
Gass 

Book 



THE TRAGEDY OF HAMTJ5T 
A P £ vi , 



By 
Henry Frank 



Sherman, French and Company 
Boston 



'./6 



?7fc; 



THE PURPORT OF THE GHOST 

! CALL the play of "Hamlet" a psycholog- 
-■- ical drama, because, as it appears to me, the 
author therein seems to depict the development 
of a singular mind, through various stages of 
transformation, from that of lofty reason and 
intellectuality to an unbalanced and half de- 
mented condition. It seems to me that Shake- 
speare was conscious of the philosophical trend of 
this effort, and that he introduced extraordinary 
situations, not merely to heighten the dramatic 
quality of the performance, but purposely to 
discourse upon an arcane and most recondite psy- 
chological theme. We will, I think, the more 
readily recognize the force of this theory, if we 
examine the original source from which the 
author drew the data of his drama. 

It is admitted by all critics of note that Shake- 
speare appropriated for the broad outline of his 
play a rude tragedy, originally written in 
French and published in the middle of the 16th 
century, by Francis de Belleforest, and after- 
wards translated into English under the title of 
"The Hystorie of Hamblet." It is very 
1 



2 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

evident to the most casual reader of the transla- 
tion of this French narrative that Shakespeare 
sought but little elsewhere for any of the re- 
markable situations in his drama, and that he 
would have but little need for further search, as 
the original story in itself is sufficiently dramatic, 
not to say tragical, to satisfy his most ardent 
imagination. 

But the first startling fact we confront in 
comparing the original French play with that of 
Shakespeare's Hamlet is that the latter intro- 
duces an entirely original situation, and that a 
most startling one, in order to account for the 
extraordinary condition of Hamlet's mind, and 
for the bold deed he finally consummated. No- 
where in the original can a trace of the super- 
natural or the occult be discerned. De 
Belleforest's "Hamlet" becomes merely a natural 
avenger of his father's murderous death, by 
first killing all the new king's drunken courtiers. 
Then hastening to the king himself, whom he 
found in hiding, he angrily thrusts his sword 
through his neck and consummates the brutal 
deed by cleaving his head from his shoulders. 
The original story reads like one of those crude 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 8 

and primitive bloody revels with which the Wal- 
halla of the Norse gods is so replete.* 

That the author should be able to deduce from 
such a rude theme of savagery and barbarism 
the subtly intellectual and profoundly philo- 
sophical story of our "Hamlet," is another illus- 
tration of the supreme quality of his genius. It 
would seem that the thought presented itself to 
Shakespeare in this wise: "If I portray Hamlet 
merely as a crude and brutal murderer, spurred 



* True, in a faint manner the germinal idea of the ghost 
had originally existed in the Hamlet legend immediately 
preceding the creation of the now extant Shakespeare Ham- 
let. In the first setting of the legend of the Danish Hamlet 
by Saxo Grammaticus in the 13th Century there was no in- 
timation of the supernatural; this consisted merely of a 
straightforward historical tradition relating to ' Amleth ' an 
ancient Danish king. Nor as the legend first appears in 
dramatic literature is there any suggestion of the supernat- 
ural. In Belleforest' original French creation, there is no 
intimation whatever of a ghost. But it seems that there was 
an old and now lost original English drama, which was writ- 
ten after the manner of the Belleforest play, and which seems 
to have been the direct pattern for the Shakespeare Hamlet 
in which the first intimation of the " Ghost " appears. It is, 
however, a very vague and indifferent suggestion, and shows 
how wondrously Shakespeare weaves a mere hint of an idea 
into a glorious and most triumphant creation. The mere 
reference to the supernatural in the old play was a cry, 
which a flitting ghost uttered, "Hamlet revenge! " and then 
disappeared. From this slender suggestion of the supernat- 
ural Shakespeare worked out the wonderful character of the 
"ghost" in the existing play, which compels the attention 
of the reader in a degree second only to that of the heroic 
melancholy Dane. 



4 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

to his deed by the discovery of his usurpatious 
uncle's felony, it will make but slight appeal to 
the imagination or to philosophical contempla- 
tion. Why should I not conjure a profounder 
motive for Hamlet's impetuous and venturesome 
deed; why not picture him as a refined, courte- 
ous, lofty-soulcd and most superior gentleman, 
whose mind has in some way been grossly affected 
by a revelation so horrifying in its nature, it 
would of itself be sufficient to unseat his reason 
and torment his being?" 

In the original story the murder of the reign- 
ing king is not done in secret, but, on the 
contrary, on the occasion of a court carousal 
which was indulged in by the courtiers and the 
vulgar royalty of the realm. These (fearing 
the fury of the murderer, who has not only slain 
the king, but secured the widow for his wife, and 
usurped the throne) become his willing tools and 
assist him to conceal the truth from the people, 
who, knowing the facts, would become rebellious. 
Hamlet, therefore, in de Belleforest's story, be- 
trayed by his mother and outraged by his usur- 
patious uncle, assumed the air of a madman to 
save himself from slaughter, and to devise a plan 
whereby he may "catch the king." 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 5 

Now, Shakespeare, by virtue of his keen in- 
ventiveness, discovering the possibility of intro- 
ducing a feature which would both intensify the 
dramatic interest of the play and suggest a pro- 
foundly philosophical theme, while naturally 
allowing room for the introduction of erudition 
and philosophical thought, divines an altogether 
different reason for Hamlet's "antic disposition." 
His startling innovation consists in the intro- 
duction of the Ghost ! 

He employs this dramatic instrumentality, 
however, in an altogether rare and remarkable 
manner. The ghost is introduced not merely to 
affright the beholder, as in the plays of Julius 
Caesar and Richard III. ; or to exploit the possi- 
bilities and indecencies of Witchcraft, as in 
Macbeth; or, even yet, as in Midsummer Night's 
Dream to tickle the sensible delight of the 
audience by the elfin witchery and magic merri- 
ment of Puck's and Oberon's realm. 

The ghost of Hamlet is apparently introduced 
as distinctively a mental phenomenon, by which 
the author is enabled to portray the psychological 
workings of a deeply thoughtfu 1 and melan- 
choly mind, and to intimate for the reader's 



6 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

benefit the delicate law that underlies the phe- 
nomenon of ethereal apparitions. In order to 
appreciate the author's purpose in the employ- 
ment of this arcane agency, it will be necessary, 
it seems to me, to contrast its use with that of 
other spectral manifestations in Shakespearean 
plays. In all his other dramas, excepting of 
course Midsummer Night's Dream, which is pal- 
pably fantastical and beyond the limitations of 
any law, the ghost is purely subjective, and can 
be detected by none other than the individual for 
whose fright or punishment it makes its appear- 
ance. At the banquet, so unceremoniously inter- 
rupted by Macbeth, because of what the guests 
believed to be a sudden stroke of illness, none 
but he beholds the ghost of Banquo; not even 
Lady Macbeth discerns it, but excitedly and with 
much confusion, exclaims to all: "Stand not 
upon the order of your going, but go at once." 

Likewise before the battle of Phillipi, it is 
Brutus alone who witnesses the wandering spirit 
of Caesar that assures him it will meet him again 
on the field of action. Richard alone is terror- 
ized beyond reclaim by the appearance of the 
spirits of his slain victims before the battle of 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 7 

Bosworth, and they achieve their mission by so 
unnerving him in his contest with Richmond that 
he falls ingloriously, and the kingdom is 
redeemed. 

In all these situations the nature of the ghost 
is not so refined or inexplicable as to present 
much difficulty in explaining its raison d'etre, or 
fitting it into a rational philosophy of the mind. 
But in the case of the Hamlet-ghost there are 
many more difficult problems involved, and the 
treatment is altogether more refined, and sug- 
gestive of recent psychological discoveries. 

The first distinctive feature which challenges 
our investigation is the intimation that the ghost 
appears as a subjective creation not to one indi- 
vidual alone, but to several, and repeatedly on 
several different occasions. Naturally this cir- 
constance suggests considerable difficulty in 
seeking to unravel Shakespeare's philosophy of 
the supernatural, and in discerning the con- 
formity of the phenomenon with scientific dis- 
coveries of recent date, or with what were extant 
at the time the author wrote. 

It is at once evident that the ghost is so 
startlingly introduced that the skeptical intel- 



8 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

i ~ 

lectuality and clearly philosophical pose of 
Hamlet's mind may be the better emphasized. It 
will be noted how gradually the author ap- 
proaches the climax of Hamlet's conviction that 
the apparition is a certainty. He does not 
abruptly introduce the subject either to Hamlet, 
or to the reader. He discovers those first who 
had already reached the conviction that the 
apparition was more than a mental delusion; and 
yet who feel that they can scarcely trust their 
senses, and would, therefore, before they reveal 
the fact to Lord Hamlet, wish to have their 
courage and conviction reinforced. Hence the 
author takes the next step. 

He introduces a character, Horatio, who is a 
confirmed skeptic, and equally learned with 
Hamlet himself. He also makes the skepticism 
of this character quite apparent by causing him 
at first to scout the whole story when those who 
first saw the vision reveal the circumstance to 
him. Horatio however is soon convinced that his 
friends are not deceived and that the appearance 
of the ghost is not only indisputable, but that it 
is manifestly that of Hamlet's deceased father. 
Hamlet's initial skepticism, therefore, is much 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 9 

allayed, because his curiosity is largely satisfied 
by the fact that his well-known scholarly friend, 
Horatio, had himself concluded that the vision 
could not be all a figment and delusion of the 
mind. Therefore, it will be observed, Shake- 
speare takes good care to have Horatio first 
introduce the subject to Hamlet, and to have him 
use Marcellus and Bernardo merely as witnesses. 
Then we perceive, in the questions Hamlet him- 
self puts to Horatio, the gradual breaking down 
of his initial doubt. 

Howbeit, Horatio has reached the climax of 
his revelation by most gradual stages, neverthe- 
less, when he comes to tell Hamlet that he thinks 
he saw his father's spirit the night before, the 
latter, although perplexed with horror and 
amazement, has still strength enough to hold his 
mental poise and ask most suggestive and pene- 
trating questions. "Where was this?" "How 
did he look?" "Was he armed?" "Did you speak 
to it?" "Saw you not his countenance? Was it 
pale or red?" "Did he fix his eyes on you?" 
Then, thinking that if it was in truth his father's 
spirit it must, having been a soldier, present the 
stains of the battle field, or, by some prescience 



10 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



thinking possibly he might have been murdered, 
he asks excitedly, "His beard was grizzled? No?" 
Then at last accoutred with sufficient knowledge 
to convince himself that the narrative is true he 
resolves, not yet wholly satisfied till he shall per- 
sonally behold the apparition, to go and watch 
with them, if perchance the ghost again appear. 

In the scenes wherein the ghost presents itself 
certainly Shakespeare has worked up a most real- 
istic story and makes escape from conviction 
almost impossible. He would seem to leave no 
room whatsoever for the theory of delusion or 
fraud. Every ground of doubt is apparently 
removed and the intelligence and personality of 
the spirit seem to be most authentically evinced. 
There are those who therefore naturally conclude 
that Shakespeare meant to advocate the theory 
of the existence and appearance of ghosts as 
commonplace and actual affairs. But we must 
remember that the story of Hamlet was written in 
the sixteenth century, when the belief in ghosts 
was almost universal, and was doubted only by the 
few studious or philosophical individuals who 
rose superior to the masses. Shakespeare has 
most deftly woven the net of circumstances so 



TURPORT OF THE GHOST 11 

neatly round the mind of Hamlet that his sub- 
jective discernment of the apparition is well 
within the scope of the psychological law. 

Walter Scott in his "Witchcraft and Demon- 
ology" says: "Enthusiastic feelings of an im- 
pressive and solemn nature occur both in public 
and in private life, which seem to add ocular 
testimony to an intercourse between earth and 
the world beyond it. For example, the son who 
has lately been deprived of his father feels a 
sudden crisis approach, in which he is anxious to 
have recourse to his sagacious advice, — or a 
bereaved husband earnestly desires again to 
behold the form of which the grave has deprived 
him forever, — or to use a darker yet more com- 
mon instance, the wretched man who has dipped 
his hand in his fellow creature's blood, is haunted 
by the apprehension that the phantom of the 
slain stands by the bed-side of the murderer." 

It will be observed that these are the exact 
conditions on which Shakespeare bases the possi- 
bility of the appearance of the spirit of the elder 
Hamlet. However, there is this distinguishing 
feature: Instead of having the spirit appear to 
the mind of the murderer, it appears to another 



12 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

whom it seeks to charge with the mission of 
revenge. Why then should the spirit appear to 
Hamlet rather than to Claudius, the murderous 
king? It is evident, in all the speeches that 
Shakespeare puts into the mouth of the king he 
makes him seem to be a most hard-hearted and 
bold-spirited person. He would appear to have 
a flinty mind and nerves of steel. In the midst 
of all suspicion he never winces, or emits the 
slightest intimation, by look or action, of his 
awful deed. He is not given to grief or pain; 
and severely chides Hamlet for exposing his 
weakness by undue mourning. "To persevere in 
obstinate condolement is a course of impious 
stubbornness," he exclaims to Hamlet, with in- 
tended rebuke. He has but little imagination, 
and intellect not more than average. He is 
given to carousals, physical indulgence, and 
thoughtless pastime. He is not easily unnerved 
or disturbed. 

Therefore, according to the known laws of 
psychological phenomena he would prove to be 
an unsensitive and unsuggestible subject 
through which to produce the deliverance of a 
spiritistic message. On the contrary, Hamlet 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 13 

is hypersensitive, intellectual, melancholy and 
contemplative. His physique, nervous tempera- 
ment and mental state are all amenable to intru- 
sions from the subjective world. Hence it is 
more natural that such visions should appear to 
the young Hamlet to taunt him to vengeance 
than that they should appear to the stolid and 
sturdy king, to tantalize and affright him. 

More than this, Hamlet is in the precise state 
of mind that makes him singularly amenable to 
such experiences, and from all known psycho- 
logical laws, one would suppose that he would 
be far more likely to see visions than that he 
should escape such an experience. He has been 
brooding for several months on the one sad 
theme of his life; namely that his father died, 
(he knows not yet that he was murdered) ; and 
that his mother married so speedily after his la- 
mentable fate. So deep is his grief because of 
these sad events that he groans: 

" O, that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter." 

There is nothing more in this life for him; it is 
a "barren promontory." He takes no delight in 



14 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

man or woman, and his very studies clog and 
fester in his brain. His melancholy is so pro- 
found that his mind is diseased: full of dark 
broodings, sinister forebodings and "bad 
dreams." More fit subject for the intrusion of 
subjective visions from another world could 
scarcely be conceived. Naturally, then, when the 
suggestion of the ghost is given him, he falls 
quickly to it, after his first doubts are dissolved, 
and permits himself to be carried to greater 
lengths than his friends who first saw it. 

Now when the ghost itself appears we shall 
see how completely its revelation and its acts 
comport with modern discoveries in the occult. 
It will be noted that the appearances of the ghost 
are graduated in distinctness, from vagueness to 
opaque reality; from its first observation by 
Marcellus and Bernardo, its second discovery by 
Horatio, to its final presentation to Hamlet. 
When the ghost appears to Horatio, Bernardo 
evidences his astonishment at the distinctness of 
the apparition, and that it bears such likeness to 
the king. Before that, in conversing about the 
ghost's appearances, the first two had called it 
"the thing," as something indistinct and nebulous. 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 15 

But when Horatio comes, who is still closer to 
Hamlet than the other two, it seems to take on 
a more manifest and convincing form. At last 
when Hamlet sees it, it is so startlingly clear and 
strong, and pauses so long for him minutely to 
observe it, that there is opportunity even for ex- 
tended conversation and familiarity. When 
Horatio ventures to speak to it, let it not be for- 
gotten, the spirit passes on, as if offended, and 
speedily disappears. But when Hamlet accosts 
it, although in such questionable and uncertain 
language it might sensitively take umbrage, it 
merely beckons to him to come away that it may 
be alone with him. And this final act is of the 
greatest importance in ferreting out the psycho- 
logical phases of this strange story. For all 
these steps are either indicative of Shakespeare's 
almost prophetic knowledge of modern scientific 
discovery, or were instant intuitions of his own, 
that now most accurately harmonize with what 
we know of such arcane, and sometime mysterious 
subjects. 

In short, my tentative solution of the problem 
is this: — Hamlet, through much dark and con- 
tinuous brooding, constantly retained in his mind 



16 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the vivid picture of his father, as he imagined 
him to lie in death, possibly clad with the habili- 
ments of war, and therefore blotched ("griz- 
zled") with the stains of blood. So long, so in- 
tently and profoundly had he carried in his 
mind's eye this solemn and affecting picture, that 
it had worn out his peace of soul and gathered 
round him a vague and haunting figure, which 
hung like a veil of gloom and ill-forboding over 
him. He had often intimated his grief to Hora- 
tio and his fellows, as we see in that conversa- 
tion, wherein Horatio says: "My lord, I came to 
see your father's funeral ;" Hamlet sorrowfully 
interrupts and says, "I pray thee, do not mock 
me, fellow student ; I think it was to see my 
mother's wedding. Would I had met my dearest 
foe in Heaven, or ever I had seen that day, Ho- 
ratio." 

It is clearly the one constant, beglooming and 
heart-sickening thought which encumbers his 
mind. What, then, more natural, than that 
through this brooding mental mood, the psychic 
visual picture — according to what we now 
vaguely call the laws of telapathy, — should have 
cast its mould on the minds of his fellow students, 



WILLIAM C. MACREADY AS HAMLET 

Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I'll go no 
further. Act I, Sc. V. 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 17 

and that when "the witching time of night" ap- 
proached, and they were naturally given to quiv- 
ering and uncanny feelings, this subjective pic- 
ture should grow clearer till at last it became ob- 
jectivized and forced them to believe they saw it 
in the air? 

All who are familiar with recent investigations 
of alleged spirit manifestations will observe that 
my theory rests strongly on what deductions psy- 
chological students have made from their obser- 
vations. 

Says Hudson in his "Law of Psychic Phenom- 
ena," "A phantom, or ghost, is nothing more or 
less, than an intensified telepathic vision; its ob- 
jectivity, power, persistency, and permanence 
being in exact proportion to the intensity of the 
emotion and desire which called it into being. It 
is the embodiment of an idea, a thought. It is 
endowed with the intelligence pertaining to that 
one thought, and no more." He also observes the 
well-known fact that when the ghost fulfils its 
mission it never appears again on this planet. 

Now all these features are well carried out in 
Shakespeare's phases of the ghost's appearance, 
and if they are to be accepted as finally scien- 



18 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

tific then it is manifest that Shakespeare has an- 
tedated modern science by many centuries. 

Hudson reminds us that the permanence of 
the phases of the ghost will be in exact propor- 
tion to the desire or mental state that called it 
forth. This would explain why the appearance 
was more vague to Marcellus and Bernado than 
to Horatio, and less clear to Horatio than to 
Hamlet. The original vision or psychic portrait 
is in the mind of Hamlet — created by his dismal 
mental state, and the portentous events which 
generated it ; by telepathy, that picture would be 
conveyed to the minds of Marcellus and Bernado 
somewhat vaguely, because of their more distant 
relation to Hamlet ; while the vision would assume 
a more positive and realistic phase to Horatio, be- 
cause his mind was more kindered with that of 
Hamlet, and because their spirits were mutually 
more cordial and congenial. When at last, how- 
ever, Hamlet himself sees the ghost, then it looms 
on his ocular vision with the opaque realit} r of 
sensible objects; because, having already grown 
familiar with it, subjectively, through long con 
templation, he could easily imagine it projecting 
itself in actual form before him. 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 19 

I am quite aware that heretofore no one, at 
least to my knowledge, has sought to study 
Shakespeare's tragedy from this psychological 
point of view, but it seems to me such study is 
thoroughly legitimate, and may prove that he 
was more of a genius in penetrating fields of un- 
frequented knowledge than is commonly sup- 
posed. When we recall that Walter Scott in the 
first quarter of the nineteenth century could do no 
more with so-called psychic phenomena than 
brush them all aside as either fraudulent or delu- 
sive, we see to what a far reach of foresight 
Shakespeare's mind must have penetrated if, 
whether consciously or unconsciously, he so 
planned the apparitions of the ghost in Hamlet 
as to make them wholly amenable to alleged mod- 
ern discoveries. 

A closer study of the observations of the ghost 
made by its beholders in the play, will show us, 
too, how Shakespeare would seem to wish us to 
interpret it. When they see the apparition the 
question naturally arises as to the causes of its 
appearance. Marcellus asks and Horatio answers. 
To make the story more interesting, and to give 
color to the theory that the phenomenon is the ef- 



20 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



feet of a subjective experience of Hamlet him- 
self, Horatio proceeds to explain that the war- 
like appearance of the spirit is indicative of ap- 
proaching troubles, consequent on former ques- 
tions of state. 

There is not the slightest intimation that the 
apparition had aught to do personally with Ham- 
let, and manifestly such a thought not yet entered 
the minds of any of them. They feel impelled 
to reveal the strange apparition to him, merely 
because it possesses the phantom-appearance of 
his father; and he, so long grieving over his 
father's death, might be somewhat comforted. 
This seems to be their only interpretation of the 
situation. Neither does Hamlet apparently think 
that the phantom has any special mission to fulfil 
on his own account, and, to all appearance is in- 
ordinately surprised when the ghost reveals the 
fact that the body of his father was slain by the 
reigning king, his uncle. 

Was this, however, wholly a surprise? Had 
not this thought subjectively lain in the mind of 
Hamlet, in a vague and uncertain manner, and 
did he not hear from the lips of the ghost that 
only which he had so long half-consciously enter- 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 21 

tained in his heart of hearts? I am inclined to 
think the latter conclusion is the correct one. 
There is a passage in the conversation between 
the ghost and Hamlet which, strange to say, has 
been but little commented on. 

Ghost: If ever thou didst thy dear father love 
Revenge his foul and most unnatural 
murther. 
Hamlet: Murther! 

Ghost: Murther most foul, as it is at best; 
Now, Hamlet hear : 
" 'Tis given out that sleeping in my or- 
chard, 
A serpent stung me ; . . . but know, thou 

noble youth, 
The serpent that did sting thy father's 

life 
Now wears the crown." 
Hamlet: my prophetic soul! 

My uncle! 

Here is a clear intimation that the thought 
that his father had been foully murdered by his 
uncle had already existed in his mind, but he was 
loath to give it expression even to himself. But 
when he hears the ghost proclaim it, then sud- 
denly the rush of memory crowds upon his mind 



22 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

and he hears himself cry aloud, "Oh, I knew it ; 
I felt it ; O, my prophetic soul, thou wert right !" 
This is manifestly the force of the entire pas- 
sage, and reveals the psychological purport of 
Hamlet's mental vision. 

Having already, in the profound depths of his 
being, felt that the king was the real murderer; 
having long been taunted by the fearful theory 
which he would not dare act upon as a fact with- 
out more satisfactory proof; it grows to such 
proportions in his mind, that it imparts its in- 
fluence telepathically to his fellows, till they be- 
hold the ocular apparition, which is but the psy- 
chic reflex of his own mental state. Then, when 
they emphasize his fears and anticipations, by 
assuring him that they have seen his father's 
ghost, he, hastening to behold it for himself, once 
more feels, only with intensified emotion, all the 
former intimations of his soul, and with too eager 
readiness accepts whatever may impress him. 
Thinking, then, that he sees the ghost and that 
it bears such perfect likeness to the psychic por- 
trait he had so long been contemplating, he ac- 
cepts the apparition as an objective fact, and 
agrees to follow it till they are alone together in 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 23 

the yawning church yard, when at last, all that 
he had ever dreamed of, or anticipated, concern- 
ing this foul tragedy, rises to his mind with such 
absolute confirmation, that he cannot but believe 
it is indeed the ghost itself which reveals it to 
him and corroborates his theory of the murder. 

Again, we may observe the intimation by 
Shakespeare that he somewhat understood the 
psychological laws which underly "spirit" appa- 
ritions, in the conversation which immediately 
ensues when the ghost bids Hamlet to depart with 
him. 

Hamlet: It waves me still. 

Go on, I'll follow thee. 
Marcellus: You shall not go my lord. 

Hamlet : Hold off your hands. 

Horatio: Be rul'd; you shall not go; 
Hamlet: My fate cries out 

And makes each petty artery in this 
body 

As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 

Still am I call'd. — Unhand me gentle- 
men, 

By heaven I'll make a ghost of him that 
lets me. 

I say away! Go on; I'll follow thee. 
Horatio: He waxes desperate with imagination. 



24 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Now herein several features are to be noted. 
First, the wild emotion that seizes his soul when 
he is overcome b} r his admiration of the ghost. 
The weird fascination, the uncanny ambition of 
venture all in one stake ; the mad desire to be with 
the apparition and take any risk it may offer; 
are all indications of that state of approaching 
madness which seizes one when self -hypnotized by 
one's own imagining or the soul's foreshadowing 
fate. But, second, Shakespeare does not leave 
this for us to surmise for ourselves. He puts it 
into the mouth of the most prominent character, 
other than Hamlet, who is present in the scene. 
He makes Horatio exclaim: "He waxes des- 
perate with imagination." That word imagina- 
tion would seem to indicate what was in the mind 
of Shakespeare as an explanation of the pheno- 
menon. This is especially emphatic considering 
that Horatio himself witnessed the vision, and felt 
that it was actual. While he is forced to ac- 
knowledge its apparent reality, somehow he can- 
not rid his mind of the theory that it is not alto- 
gether real, but is in some way associated with 
the mind's imagination. And Horatio's curious 
assertion is in exact accord with modern psycho- 
logy. 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 25 

In recent psycological experimentation the se- 
cret of the mind's objective visualization of its 
subjective states has perhaps been revealed. Says 
James in his "Psychology," "Meyer's account of 
his own visual images is very interesting. He 
says" : 

With much practice I have suceeded in mak- 
ing it possible for me to call up subjective visual 
sensations at will. I tried all my experiments by 
day or at night with my eyes closed. At first it was 
very difficult. In the first experiments that suc- 
ceeded, the whole picture was luminous, the shadows 
being given in a somewhat less strong bluish light. 
I can compare these drawings less to chalk marks 
made on a blackboard than to drawings made with 
phosphorus on a dark wall at night. If I wished 
for example to see a face without intending that of 
a particular person, I saw the outline of a profile 
against a dark background. I can now call before 
my eyes almost any object which I please, as a sub- 
jective appearance, and this in its own natural 
color and illumination. Another experiment of mine 
was when I thought I saw a silver stirrup, and 
after I had looked at it awhile, I opened my eyes 
and for a long while afterwards saw its after- 
image.' " 

I cite these experiments merely to show what 



26 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

modern science has learned of the objective pow- 
ers of the imagination. If what Meyer accom- 
plished could be done in cold blood, and by a sheer 
exercise of the will, imagine how much more 
powerful must be the effects when they are gen- 
rated by a potent explosion of the feelings, an 
intense emotional awakening, or a sudden and 
exciting anticipation of overmastering desire! 

At this juncture, however, a serious problem 
may present itself to the mind of the thoughtful 
reader. It would appear to be within the range 
of natural law that the apparition of a departed 
human being might be telepathically communi- 
cated to a single person, and it would be natural 
to suppose that such person would regard the 
vision as objective. But how, it may be enquired, 
shall we account, on the basis of telepathy, for 
the dual or triple simultaneous appearance of 
such a phenomenon — where, in other words, sev- 
eral persons simultaneously detect the same appa- 
rition? Can this be explained by any of the 
known laws of telepathy? Can it be said for in- 
stance that the alleged imaginative form of the 
father of Hamlet could have so vividly impressed 
the mind of the son that through his own imagi- 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 27 

nation he could impart the same vision to several 
others at the same time? 

The generally accepted theory of telepathy is 
that one may hold in his subjective mind a certain 
image which, while wholly unconscious to one's 
self, may be discerned by another possessing me- 
diumistic powers, or may be so impressed upon 
another as to appear to him like an external ob- 
ject. But ordinarily it is not supposed that one's 
unconscious imagination may so obtrude itself 
upon another or several others as to objectivize 
its visions to them, making them discern as an 
apparently real object that which exists in one's 
own mind but as an unconscious experience. 

Recent experiments, however, have materially 
revised this former opinion. It is now known that 
the subconscious or subjective imagination is so 
powerful and unique that it may not only project 
its visions on several others simultaneously, but 
that such projection may occur some time after 
the event, which gave rise to the subconscious ex- 
perience, has taken place. For instance, if one 
should die in much pain and far from any possible 
human assistance, the serious longing of the suf- 
ferer in the moment of death might enter the 



28 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

mind of a friend or relative unconsciously, and 
after an extended interval might suddenly rise to 
the surface of consciousness, and in doing so 
might also simultaneously rise to the conscious- 
ness of another sympathetic mind. In other 
words, the apparition of a departed person may 
be conjured by the unconscious mind in such 
shape that the conscious mind may discern it as 
an apparently objective experience; or the im- 
pression made upon the subconscious mind of an 
individual may not rise to his own consciousness, 
but may affect the consciousness of another so 
that the latter will think that what he sees is an 
external object, — or it may affect several at the 
same or at different times in the same manner. 

The fact that the vision was not seen for sev- 
eral months after the death of the person comes 
under the heading in modern parlance of "de- 
ferred percipience." That is, the impression 
made upon the unconscious mind does not imme- 
diately rise to the plane of percipient conscious- 
ness, but requires some time to break through, as 
it were, the crust of customary and conventional 
experience. On this point Mr. F. W. H. Meyers, 
the distinguished authority on telepathy says: 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 29 

"We find in the case of phantasms corresponding 
to some accident or crisis which befalls a living 
friend, that there seems often to be a latent 
period before the phantasm becomes definite or 
externalized to the percipient's eye or ear. . . . 
It is quite possible that a deferrment of this kind 
may sometimes intervene between the moment of 
death and the phantasmal announcement thereof 
to a distant friend." 

Thus we see the fact that the apparition did 
not appear to Hamlet for some long time after 
the murderous taking off of his father does not 
remove it from the form of a possible telepathic 
experience. Perhaps there are not yet found in 
modern experiments the proof of the apparition 
appearing many months after the decease (if 
dead) or the crisis (if living), but it is apparent 
that if the percipiency of the telepathic commu- 
nication may be deferred for any time, the period 
of such deferrment cannot arbitrarily be deter- 
mined. Thus the late return of the ghost of 
Hamlet's father would not throw the explanation 
of the phenomenon beyond the plain of a pure 
telepathic experience. In this regard, therefore, 
we find the great dramatist in possible harmony 



30 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

with a science discovered centuries after his ex- 
istence. 

The fact that most impresses me is that our 
author living in an age when the belief in ghosts 
and apparitions was common and most popular 
should have introduced the doubts of a philoso- 
pher, who rests such doubts on laws whose exist- 
ence could then have been but vaguely surmised 
and which have been brought to the light only in 
recent years. True, these laws are not yet cer- 
tainly known and our own conclusions concerning 
them are necessarily tentative; nevertheless, the 
fact that they could have been foreseen, however 
dim and imperfectly, so many centuries ago, 
comes to me as a forcible feature of the surpass- 
ing genius of Shakespeare. He introduces the 
ghost naturally for purposes of dramatic inter- 
est. But as he makes of Hamlet a most thought- 
ful and philosophic character he refuses to per- 
mit him to fall in with the common belief and 
superstition of his time. The manner however 
in which he evidences his skepticism, his intima- 
tion of a knowledge of certain arcane forces in 
nature, and his startling hint of a psychological 
science which only the most far seeing could pos- 



PURPORT OF THE GHOST 31 

sibly anticipate, places Hamlet not only centuries 
ahead of his own age, but even of the age of 
Shakespeare. It is to this point that I desire to 
call especial attention. 

This, then, is my interpretation of the use 
which Shakespeare makes of the ghost in the 
drama of Hamlet. It is a profound psychologi- 
cal phenomenon, and I cannot but marvel that he 
seemed so far to foresee the discoveries of science 
as to have anticipated them by three centuries or 
more. Of course it would be extravagant to in- 
sist that Shakespeare was wholly conscious of 
these laws ; but that he somewhat divined them, 
howbeit dimly, it seems to me can scarcely be 
questioned in the light of a careful analysis of 
the psychological phases of the scenes he intro- 
duces in this matchless tragedy. Well does he 
make Hamlet exclaim to his friend, "There are 
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed 
of in your philosophy, Horatio." Again in his 
tempestuous outburst after the ghost has warned 
him and vanished, Hamlet shouts: 

" O all you host of heaven ! O earth ! what else ? 
Shall I couple hell ! " 

Herein he makes it very evident that he is aware, 



32 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

as afterwards he indicates more plainly, that 
what he saw might be an apparition of hell, that 
is, a delusion and hence untrustworthy. He says 
that the devil is very potent with those who are 
melancholy and suffering with mental weaknesses, 
and makes them think that the figments of their 
minds are external realities. 

Here, then, I leave a partial study of one phase 
-of Shakespeare's genius which it seems to me has 
been but too slightly regarded. If I have made 
some suggestions that will be pursued by those 
who are more capable and shall have opened up 
an original avenue of investigation into the pro- 
found depths of this master mind, I shall perhaps 
have performed a slight service in this commend- 
able labor. Thus much we know, Shakespeare's 
genius is so vast and comprehensive we can never 
tell on what far shore of thought or discovery we 
may meet with him; but whether or not he has 
anticipated us, we are quite often aware that he 
has hinted or forestalled the way, so that by ob- 
serving his guide boards the path of knowledge 
may be more easily found and the goal attained. 



II 

HAMLET'S MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 



HAMLET'S MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 

'T^O me one of the most important advantages 
■*■ derived from the study of Shakespeare is his 
revelation of human nature. Rightly understood I 
believe that he reveals a knowledge of the mind 
in its infinite ramifications through human charac- 
ter that is not approached by any other author. 
To him a knowledge of life seemed to come 
intuitively ; it called apparently for but little con- 
scious effort on his part to create exteriorly the 
well defined character that lay so clearly in his 
mind. He seemed but to think the character and 
instantly his magic pen portrayed it. For by 
the thinking he seemed to become the thing he 
thought. As he himself says on the lips of 
Hamlet, "there is nothing either good or bad, 
but thinking makes it so." So it seemed to be 
with the characters which came to his mind; for, 
on the instant of their conception they seemed to 
grow into life and maturity by a natural and 
uninterrupted process of thought. 

And I believe herein lies the source of all the 
marvel and majesty of his genius. His charac- 
ters become as actual to him as he himself; 
35 



\ 



36 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

indeed for the time being they are himself, and 
while they occupy his consciousness he knows 
himself as none other than what they are. There- 
fore he discerns the very workings of their minds, 
the emotions of their hearts, the trend of their 
development, the seed-time and decay of their 
organic functions. For he becomes not only the 
character he conceives, but also its analyst, its 
student, its psychological investigator, and its 
philosophical contemplator. He unravels for us 
as it were the complete tangle and confusion of 
the feelings, thoughts, sentiments, aspirations 
and ambitions, the loves and hatreds, the very 
breathings of the brain and tremblings of the 
nerves, of each materialization of his mind. 
Hence I think we should make it our chief est 
effort in studying the Master to ferret out his 
meaning, to discern the rationale of the drama, 
its motif, and the psychological embodiment of 
each character, from Shakespeare's point of view 
alone, and not from what point of view we might 
prefer. It should be our desire to learn how the 
creator of these characters conceived and viewed 
them; what interpretation he himself placed on 
them, and to hold in our mind's eye as far as pos- 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 37 

sible, the actual personage he himself portrayed. 
At least it seems to me this is the only way to 
study Shakespeare as a genius ; if that be our 
ambition. 

But if our ambition be rather to struggle with 
the framework of a character which the author 
has given us, and then with this framework to 
build around it such flesh and blood, such emo- 
tions and thoughts as may suit our purpose or 
temperament, then we are not studying Shake- 
speare, but we are studying ourselves in Shake- 
speare. By this process perhaps we may find out 
what manner of man we are, but we discern less 
of Shakespeare as we observe more of ourself. 
In short, for purposes of Shakespearean knowl- 
edge, I regard the usual emendations by scholars 
and actors, as but of little value to the serious 
student of the author himself. If we are to 
know the Richard of Shakespeare we must take 
him with all his native repulsiveness and refined 
barbarism, just as he is painted. If he is not as 
such suited to our taste, then we may eschew him 
as a whole without doing offence to his literary 
creator; but if we determine to appropriate the 
substance of this Richard, as the author has 



38 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

created him, and then to clothe him with our own 
temperament and sentimentalism, sloughing off 
where we will and padding as we choose, we are 
passing off for Shakespeare what is not his own, 
and purloining his genius to exalt our inferiority. 
So with Hamlet. Now there have been numer- 
ous Hamlets which the stage has presented from 
Garrick and Betterton to Booth and the moderns. 
All of these Hamlets have been distinct — in one 
way or another differentiated. Yet they have 
passed as Shakespeare's Hamlet, although so far 
apart. Whether baldly insane as the Hamlets of 
Macready, Forrest and the traditional actors, or 
merely on the border land between insanity and 
sanity as Booth's and Irving's Hamlet, or, as in 
the twentieth century Hamlet, ever normal and 
healthful in mind, but purposely feigning insan- 
ity to intrigue against the king and thereby 
achieve the vengeance on which the Ghost has set 
him ; will all depend upon the temperament of the 
interpretor and his philosophical bent of mind. 
From the mere text itself any or all of these in- 
terpretations are logical and legitimate. There- 
fore none can be accused of violating the purpose 
or spirit of the author by producing a melancholy 
Hamlet of either of the types above described. 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 39 

But it seems to me it is going beyond legiti- 
mate interpretation and construction, for one to 
entertain a certain interpretation of the character 
of Hamlet and then so modify the text — cutting 
out the scenes and speeches that are incongruous 
with such an interpretation — as to make the modi- 
fied text conform with the interpretation. If 
Hamlet is conceived as a rarely refined and cour- 
teous gentleman, from whose lips could never fall 
even the hint of vulgarity and whose heart is so 
tender it is incapable of abuse ; then there are pas- 
sages — such as his speeches to Ophelia when his 
frenzy flares to its highest pitch — in the almost 
grotesque scene where he leaps into the grave 
and struggles with Laertes in proof of his wild 
protestations of love for the "fair Ophelia" — that 
seem to contradict the uniform courteousness of 
his demeanor and gentleness of heart. To strike 
out these passages in order to permit nothing 
incongruous to appear that would destroy the 
perfect portrayal of the character as conceived, 
may be good art, but it is not justice to Shake- 
speare and certainly violative of his text. 

In short we are not permitted in any legitimate 
intepretation of this character to force our own 



40 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ideas into the readings of the play to such an 
extent as to modify the text merely for the 
purpose of saving the harmony of the inter- 
pretation we may conceive. The character 
of the Shakespearean Hamlet must be read from 
the text, not from the temperamental quality of 
the interpreting actor. This done, then the tem- 
perament of the actor may justifiably so play 
with the text by way of interpretation and inflec- 
tion, gesture and intonation as Avill best set forth 
his conception. What is enjoined upon us as 
students of Shakespeare, however, is to decipher 
the actual character which he seemed to have in 
mind. And that is no easy task when we would 
study the character of Hamlet. 

First then in our effort to compass this labor 
we would ask what seems to be the main-spring — 
so to speak — in Hamlet's character around which 
all the structure apparently is woven and that 
ever stirs the wheels of action? He is called the 
melancholy Dane, and not unjustly. From the 
first appearance in the play to the closing tragic 
scene he is most downcast, sad and disconsolate. 
He scarcely suffers a smile to break on his coun- 
tenance save in way of irony and but laughs 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 41 



hysterically and without enjoyment. When he 
strives to be light and gay he but plays with the 
effort, and effort indeed it is. There is not a 
moment when this "gloomy mantle" fails him, 
whether in his secret meetings with Ophelia, or 
with his scholarly, soldier friends, or with his 
fellows at court who are set to spy on him, or 
with the wearisome old fool who fatigues him 
with his tedious platitudes, or even while alone 
and unseen of the world, when he laughs with 
genuine sincerity or smiles in idle pleasure. A- 
cloud constantly covers his brow, a veil screens 
his vision, he lives in an unseen world, he beholds 
things that the common eyes of men see not, and 
which but harrow and distress him. What is 
worse, he loves this state of mind and instead of 
seeking to correct it, he but cultivates and en- 
courages it. His mind is so thoroughly colored 
with the murky tints of melancholy that he pre- 
fers its gloomy atmosphere to that of sunset 
splendors or orient dawns. It is this disposition 
of Hamlet that comes to constitute the very core 
of his character, which finally directs his actions 
and spurs him to his tragic fate. 

We should study this melancholic phase of his 



42 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

character patiently, for in this I think we shall 
discover the key that will unlock the mystery that 
has always hovered round the mind of Hamlet, 
and perhaps enable us to solve the problem of his 
sanity. 

Melancholy has a double and apparently con- 
tradictory effect. It at once deadens the feelings 
and excites the thoughts. Nothing is so condu- 
cive to keen penetration and brilliant imagination 
as the inspiration of melancholy. This is demon- 
strated by the fact that most all poetic artists 
have the imaginative faculty developed to a high 
degree Burton in his quaint and classic work 
reminds us that "melancholy advances man's con- 
ceits more than any humor whatever." Furnished 
then with this mental accompaniment it is natural 
that Hamlet should have preferred always to be 
alone, to nurse his feelings, to see only what his 
mind's eye and the profound meditations of his 
soul would conjure for him. It is natural that 
he should live in dreams, fancies and hallucina- 
tions. It is also natural that having once seen 
these fancies and hallucinations he should seek to 
cultivate their presence and court their blessing. 
As Burton describes the man of melancholy so 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 43 

quaintly, yet so true, I quote him here to illus- 
trate Hamlet's state of mind. 

" When I go musing all alone, 
Thinking of divers things foreknown; 
When I build castles in the air, 
Void of sorrow, void of care, 
Pleasing myself with phantasies sweet, 
Methinks the time runs very fleet; 
All my joys to this are folly; 
Naught so sweet as melancholy." 

"I'll not change life with any King; 
I vanished am; can the world bring 
More joy than still to laugh and smile, 
As time in pleasant toys beguile? 
Do not, O do not, trouble me. 
So sweet content I feel and see; 

All my joys to this are folly; 

None so divine as melancholy." 

Hence we will note that each time Hamlet is 
approached by his fellows he is inclined to slight 
and avoid them, save only his one bosom friend, 
Horatio, in whom he implicitly confides. While 
he entertains Rosencrans and Gilderstern, he does 
so in a gingerly and condescending manner, 
keenly feeling their unfriendliness and suspicion. 



44 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

He evinces no delight or joyous spirit at their 
approach and in the conversation which ensues 
in Act second of the play he merely parries with 
them, cutting with such keen repartee and insinu- 
ation that he has much difficulty to veil his in- 
sincerity. But even in this conversation, which 
invites to lightsomeness and gaiety he cannot 
conceal his downcast spirit, and pleads it as an 
excuse for his want of rationality. Rosencrans 
playfully taunts him with ambition, because 
Hamlet had said that Denmark was a prison to 
his thinking. But Hamlet responds "O God, I 
could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself 
a king of infinite space, were it not that I have 
had dreams." Here Hamlet although at play 
cannot but expose the gloom of his real mental 
state and the ever present melancholia that haunts 
him. His bad dreams are the consequence of that 
state of mind that broods on things of evil report, 
on griefs, on worries that are but shadows taken 
for substantial causes. He closes the conversa- 
tion, which was rapidly rising into a high degree 
of mental exercise, with the curt remark, " Shall 
we to the court? for, my fay, I cannot reason." 
He is so much depressed, so much annoyed by 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 45 

their presence, preferring so much to be alone, 
that he cannot enjoy the exchange of thoughts, 
and hence becomes almost discourteous to his 
friends. At last suddenly breaking forth from his 
crust of insincerity and devious insinuations he 
speaks to them openly, charging them with the 
mission of having been sent to watch on and detect 
him, and after receiving their admission that it"is 
true, he speaks as man to man and lays bare all the 
sallowness and grim complexion of his soul. "I 
have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all 
my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise; and 
indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that 
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile 
promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, 
look you, this brave, o'er-hanging firmament, this 
majestical roof fretted with golden fire, — why it 
appears to me no other thing than a foul and 
pestilent congregation of vapours." 

Thus we notice that Hamlet refuses to accept 
any favorable opportunity to cast aside his garb 
of gloom and enjoy a moment of merriment and 
delight. He hugs his grief; he pets his pain. 
He tells no one of his deep secret, except his most 
lieart-near friend, but buries it within the tomb 



46 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

of his bosom, and rears hard by the stone of 
memory, that he may ever sit beside it, to think 
and groan and despair. We might ask if this is 
natural; if the author has correctly portrayed 
the mental condition of one who swoons in melan- 
choly — so much engrossed within himself that he 
can see naught else in all the world. Would not 
such a person be rather so self -engrossed that he 
would be shy of his feelings, and in place of vul- 
garly exposing them seek the rather to conceal 
and disguise them? 

A melancholy person is always hypersensitive. 
Such people naturally hesitate to lift the veil 
from the secret avenues of the heart and expose 
the true condition of their inward parts. They 
feel that they are so different from others, that 
they can but groan when others laugh and weep 
when others smile, that they would ensconce them- 
selves if possible and ever avoid public notice. 
Hence their pleasure with solitude and their utter 
annoyance from the intrusion of others. While 
this is true, it is however more especially true of 
those melancholy persons who are distinguished 
as subjects of hysteria than those who while sad 
and crestfallen are still strong nerved and pos- 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 47 

sessed of mental force. The hysteric is self-con- 
tained, secretive and deceptive. But the victim 
of pure intellectual melancholy does not seem to 
be overcome with such artificial and inhuman 
feelings; he, however,) annoyed by the intrusion 
of others, is not averse to descanting on his feel- 
ings, but rather enjoys society if it will admit 
of such boresome and self -satisfying conversation. 
Hence as Dr. Bucknill truly says, "Hamlet is not 
slow to confess his melancholy, and, indeed, it is 
the peculiarity of this mental state, that those 
suffering from it seldom or never attempt to con- 
ceal it. A man will conceal his delusions, will 
deny and veil the excitement of mania, but the 
melancholiac is almost always readily confidential 
on the subject of his feelings. In this he re- 
sembles the hypochondriac, though perhaps not 
from the same motive. The hypochondiac seeks 
for sympathy and pity; the melancholiac fre- 
quently admits others to the sight of his mental 
wretchedness from mere despair of relief and 
contempt for pity." 

We have here a capable medical authority for 
the correctness of the picture of intellectual sad- 
ness, or melancholia, drawn for us by the master- 



48 THE TRAGEDY OF 'HAMLET 

artist of all time. Hamlet indeed is prodigal of 
introspective speculations and quite as freely 
dilates on them in the presence of others as when 
alone. Indeed his only annoyance when with 
others seems to be when they are uncongenial to 
his mood of thought or seek to divert his atten- 
tion from himself. 

Thus we notice how indifferently he indulges 
the conversation with Guilderstern and Rosen- 
crantz, until the moment arrives when he might 
descant on his own wretchedness. Then suddenly 
he rouses himself from demure disinterestedness, 
and becomes animate and serious. But so soon 
as the conversation again wanders into mere ab- 
stractions upon general subjects which are not 
immediately relevant to his wonted state of mind, 
he cuts it short and intimates that they would 
best hasten to court. 

But Rosencrantz suddenly takes him off his 
guard and pricks his attention by intimating that 
some players in whom he once delighted were now 
strolling in their vicinity and would soon be pres- 
ent. His interest is, however, but indifferently 
aroused. For he retorts with bantering sarcasm, 
the chief force of which lies in the fact that his 



CHARLES KEMBLE AS HAMLET 



Alas! poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio. 

Act V, Sc. I. 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 49 

words contain a half -concealed intimation of the 
great grief and hatred that are ever warring 
against his reason and his peace of mind. 

When he wantonly exclaims "He that plays the 
king shall be welcome ; his majesty shall have trib- 
ute of me ; the aventurous knight shall use his foil 
and target ; the lover shall not sigh gratis ;"etc, 
it seems clear to me that he slyly reveals the 
thoughts that are in his mind about the king, his 
uncle, who now reigns, on whom the ghost has 
sent him to work his vengeance. For, we learn a 
little later in the conversation that a certain in- 
hibition has been put by the King's proclamation 
upon the actors, preventing them from acting in 
the theatres as they were formerly wont to. Ham- 
let asks Rosencrantz why the actors are now trav- 
elling, or strolling, and says it would be better 
both for their reputation and their purses if they 
would abide in one place. To which Rosencrantz 
replies: "I think their inhibition comes by reason 
of the late innovations." That is (for the text is 
here probably inverted and we should read that 
the innovation is the result of a recent inhibition) 
the King and parliament, because of the abusive 
criticism and ridicule to which they had been put 



50 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

in the popular play-houses had inhibited all the 
players from performing in the cities or at fixed 
places ; so they were compelled to wander and play 
where they could be heard. 

Hamlet, hearing this, implies, by what he says, 
that he will only too gladly welcome the one who 
plays the king and shall pay him tribute. Mean- 
ing, undoubtedly, in the light of the events of the 
day, that the actor playing the role of the king 
will perchance bring his reigning uncle into ridi- 
cule or make him the victim of abuse, which 
would afford Hamlet his heart's delight in his 
present frame of mind. 

No subject of conversation apparently can 
arise that he will not turn upon himself, and ad- 
dress himself to, only so long as he can make it 
subservient to his ambition. 

When at length he seems really to experience 
serious interest in the players after they enter 
and he discovers among them some old friends, it 
is only that he may ask them to recite some 
verses, which are so manifestly a reflection of the 
deep thoughts that lie secretly in his own mind, as 
to fit them illy in the drama, if otherwise con- 
strued. The verses recite how Pyrrhus sought 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 51 

out the aged Priam to avenge the crime of his 
"lord's murther." When Pyrrrus meets at last 
with Priam in the midst of the flame and blood 
of the field he lifts high his sword about to strike 
off his ear, but pauses as if paralyzed, with his 
sword suspended mid-air. Then after Pyrrhus 
recovers his senses, "aroused vengeance sets new 
a-work, and never did the Cyclop's hammer fall 
with less remorse than Pyrrhus' bleeding sword 
now falls on Priam." 

Who but can see in this allegorical speech, 
Hamlet's own mental reflections and vengeful am- 
bitions? Who is there that cannot here also dis- 
cern the hesitant state of his mind, knowing well 
that it is most difficult for him to act even when 
a favorable opportunity presents itself? How 
well the verses work out his own "bad dreams," 
wherein he sees himself, after the first palsy of 
fear has been o'ermasterd, roused with vengeance 
to work anew and at last letting the fatal blow 
fall that shall end the life of the king, his uncle, 
and avenge his noble "lord's, his father's mur- 
ther !" 

We shall be able the better to understand the 
state, and serious affliction, of Hamlet's mind, if 



52 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

we observe how gradually his interest increases as 
he listens to the curious verses spoken so well by 
the actor, refusing to allow any interruption, and 
bluntly insulting the premier, Polonius, who at- 
tempts it. Evidently some idea is germinating in 
his mind. He has suddenly become c, nI§pTred with 
some thought that makes him appear more natu- 
ral and normal than since his first introduction 
in the play. What is it? What has the actor 
said that should so suddenly arouse his undis- 
guised and earnest interest? Up to this time he 
has been but playing with them all; bandying 
words and repartees ; cutting them with the keen 
stiletto of his wit; staunching their wounds with 
gentle reminders of his mental irresponsibility. 
But now something has entered his mind that 
causes him to quiver from head to foot ; waves of 
heat run rapidly through his frame. He is all 
excitement. He commends the actors to Polonius 
and asks him to care for them in good estate. 

"My lord, I will use them according to their 
deserts," replies the old gentleman. Hamlet re- 
torts with extraordinary animation, "God's body- 
kins ! Use every man after his deserts and who 
should escape whipping? Use them after your 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 53 

own honor and dignity." That is, he wishes them 
to be royally entertained and to receive the best 
the court can afford. What has caused him to 
become engrossed so suddenly in these strolling 
actors that inspires him to bestow on them all the 
princely favors of his power? He dismisses them 
all, save one. Him, he hastily intercepts and 
asks with much animation, "Dost thou hear me, 
old friend; canst thou play the murder of Gon- 
zago?" Hearing that he can and will, Hamlet 
becomes almost hysterical with delight and cries 
out, "We'll ha't to-morrow night." But first he 
asks the privilege of inserting fifteen or sixteen 
lines. The whole plan is suddenly concocted in 
his mind as a maddening inspiration, and he is all 
too eager once again to be alone and contemplate 
the results. 

Throughout this entire scene We have felt that 
Hamlet has been bored by everybody, by his old 
friends Guilderstern and Rosencrantz, infinitely 
bored by the tedious old fool, Polonius, and bored 
but little less by the clever and interesting actors, 
until, as by a sudden stroke of lightning, his 
mind is made to whirl and grow dizzy by an in- 
stantaneous thought that smites it. Now he is 



54 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ready to live again for there is something to live 
for and he shall yet taste the sweets of holy ven- 
geance. But we see how speedily he returns to 
his much caressed and ever welcome melancholy so 
soon as he is free from the embarrassment of 
others. 

They have all gone. With a sigh, he turns 
and exclaims "Now I am alone." As much as to 
say, "At last this horrible boredom has vanished 
and I am with the only company I can endure — 
myself and my sweet melancholy." It is this 
melancholy that ever comforts him with false and 
illusive blessings when all the world seems stale, 
flat and unprofitable; it is this melacholy that 
ever cries "Heed only me and list not to the cau- 
tion or advice of others. My will is supreme for 
you ; abide with me ; do as I command and the 
purpose of your life shall be fulfilled, the tri- 
umph of your ambition attained." And, as all 
melancholiacs are wont to do, he refuses to heed 
aught but the grim and moody messenger of evil. 
It leads him on step by step to the final and fatal 
deed — the culmination of the gruesome Ghost's 
command, but not also without its violation ; for 
the Ghost adjured him not to injure or cause the 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 55 

physical injury of his mother, but to let the ser- 
pents in her own mind sting her to misery. 

However in the vengeful deed to which phren- 
etic melancholy dragged him, not only did he 
compass the death of the king, his uncle, but also 
that of his mother as well as of himself. Once 
the evil deed loomed on his vision as the one only 
noble and purposeful motive of his life; once by 
constant nursing, the demon of vengeance rose 
so high in his being as to become his master — all 
other deeds of evil, all other impulses of wrong 
gain an audacious mastery, and sway him to their 
purpose. Thus with apparent ease he slays the 
deep and sacred love for the fair Ophelia that 
once thrived in his breast ; he slays with but little 
compunction the unfortunate old man that hid 
behind the arras ; and he would with as little com- 
punction have slain the obstreperous Laertes in 
the grave of his sister if Providence had not oth- 
erwise ordained. 

Once brooding melancholy sits like a grim spec- 
tre on the throne of the brain, it concocts but evil 
passions, mental monsters, and vain conceits that 
delude the heart and lead to murder or self- 
slaughter — to fathomless misery or irremediable 
insanity. 



x 



56 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Thus does our hero tread step by step the fatal 
path, led on by every fortuitous circumstance 
that melancholy can conjure, repugnant to every 
invitation that would lead him back to reason and 
to peace. Now that all are gone and he is again 
alone, save for his melancholy, he instantly whips 
himself into a passion of self abuse and brutal 
chiding. He has beheld the actors worked up to 
tears and consuming passion by a figment of the 
brain, a mere phantasmagoria of words, in which 
no human interest is involved, no earthly charac- 
ter disported, while he, "a dull and muddy-met- 
tled rascal, unpregnant of his cause, can say 
nothing." Fiercer and fiercer his words become, 
set on fire by the conflagration of his burning 
soul. "Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? 
Plucks off my beard? Tweaks me by the nose? 
'Swounds ! I would take it ; for it cannot be but 
I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make op- 
pression bitter," he shouts to himself, tearing his 
hair and beating his breast. 

X Deeper grows the passion; more intense and 
cutting his self-chiding. "Why Avhat an ass I 
am ! Fie upon it ! Foh ! About my brain !" That 
is, there has been waste enough of time and op- 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 57 

portunity. Now old brain to your work; con- 
coct some scheme that will inspire and achieve. 
Then comes the clear conception of the plot 
through his muddy brain, his intent grows strong 
and vivid, he beholds the victory already in hand. 
"I have heard," with animating emotion he ru- 
minates — "that guilty creatures sitting at play, 
have by the very cunning of the scene, been 
struck so to the soul that presently they have 
proclaimed their malefactions." Ay! there's the 
scheme ! Now he has it. At last he has found 
the plan whereby he may convict the king of his 
own guilt without placing his absolute reliance 
upon the uncertain ghost which he knows not yet 
may be other than but a figment of the brain. 

He cannot but urge upon his thoughtful, how- 
ever dilatory, mind, that the thing he has beheld 
may be the devil. He is all too conscious of the 
deep dolefulness and depression of his spirit, and 
sufficiently intelligent to know that in such a state 
of mind there is gross danger of deception from 
the illusionments of hallucination. Therefore he 
still feels, notwithstanding he is inwardly con- 
vinced that his uncle is the murderer, that he must 
have more ocular proof than what a flitting phan- 



58 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

torn may afford. Hence what joy seizes him 
when at length he believes he has struck on a 
scheme that will reveal the unvarnished truth, 
which when known will nerve him to his deed so 
that as the bleeding sword of Pyrrhus fell on the 
quivering frame of Priam, he shall be nerved to 
let fall on the breast of the king his swift-swung 
and hungry sword of vengeance. 

This henceforth is his highest ambition: the 
only purpose and motive of his life. All else is ab- 
sorbed and forgotten in this. Thus has the brood- 
ing "weakness" conquered him, smothering his in- 
tellect, violating his reason, hardening his affec- 
tions, darkening his soul. There is but one thing 
now to live for. To catch the king by the proof 
of the play and then to slay him as he would a 
rat. 

Such is the work of Melancholy — such the 
gruesome effect of nursing a disease of the spirit 
that thought alone engenders and thought alone 
can remove. He who would be sorrowful can 
easily conjure such doleful monsters to his side 
as shall o'ershadow all the sunlight and the splen- 
dor of the world with one universal and porten- 
tous cloud. Of no other disease so much as this 



MENTAL TRANSFORMATION 59 

are Plato's wise words true. "The body's mis- 
chiefs," says he, "proceed from the soul; and if 
the mind be not first satisfied, the body can never 
be cured." 

Erudite as was Hamlet, and deeply bent on 
philosophy, this simple law he had never learned, 
or if he had, he stubbornly refused to put it into 
practice. There is but one cure for the weak- 
ness of melancholy, and that is the cure of mind. 
No medicine can "minister to a mind diseased ; or 
pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow." Mac- 
beth despaired of medicine and cried to his doctor 
to throw physic to the dogs. Macbeth was right, 
but like Hamlet, he too, had apparently not 
learned that a disease of the mind, though un- 
amenable to medicine, is subject to the ministra- 
tions of a physician more subtle, sane and sen- 
sible. If the mind is cast in the morbid mould of 
sorrow, grief and pain ; melt the mould and cast 
it once again in the frame of joy, merriment and 
hope. If thy thoughts lead thee to evil propen- 
sities, to passions base and vicious, conjure oth- 
ers by the magic power of the mind that shall 
guide thee to virtue, purity and peace. 

The mind is both the monitor and mentor of 



60 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the soul; leading it to grief and gloom or glad- 
ness and delight, as it is affected by the thoughts 
that flit athwart it. This Hamlet did no Know, 
or if he did, cared not to heed it. The voice of 
the spirit had come in the very nick of time, 
when he was already afflicted with grief at his 
father's death and shame at his mother's untimely 
marriage; and however deeply it plunged him in 
grief and woe, the more would he yearn for and 
hunger after the medium that brought him to this 
state. That is the Hamlet which the master artist 
so strongly and so faithfully portrays ; true in 
every iota, faultless as well in science as philoso- 
phy, in psychology as in art. Melancholy was 
indeed to him the never failing nurse of ven- 
geance, which at last he consummated, but not 
without deep inroads into his mental poise and 
physical stability — not without such shattering 
of his intellect as brought him to the very verge 
of insanity, if indeed it did not hurl him head- 
long down the beetling precipice. 



Ill 

MEDITATIONS ON SUICIDE 
A STUDY IN HALLUCINATIONS 



MEDITATIONS ON SUICIDE 

TN our study thus far, of Shakespeare's drama, 
-*- we have reached the stage in the unfoldment 
of Hamlet's character that reveals the deplorable 
plight of his mental condition. 

Deeper and thicker the clouds are darkening 
about his mind. Gloomier grows every outlook. 
The guide posts point not elsewhere than to de- 
spair, and he conceives no other end than death to 
all, himself included. "O that the everlasting 
had not fixed his canon 'gainst self slaughter," 
he cries prophetically, already perceiving in his 
soul the intimations of the dread finale of his 
fate. And yet his native buoyancy would, if left 
unhindered, perhaps neutralize the grim effect of 
his melancholy. He himself seems to feel so, and 
seizes every opportunity to nurse and enhance his 
gloomy disposition. 

The entire soliloquy at the close of the second 
act is an evidently arduous and painful effort to 
goad his vengeful purpose, and to encourage it 
by gathering round his mind the gloomiest and 
most foreboding visions he can conjure. He 
seems to feel that he will fail when brought to the 
63 



64 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

verge of action. Remembering that his own mind 
is so constantly depressed and enangered be- 
cause of his dilatoriness and irresistible hesitancy, 
we may well understand that the vision, which 
appears to him when he is closeted at last alone 
with his mother, was the figment of his brain, 
conjured by his half -diseased imagination. He is 
in the midst of a fierce diatribe against his uncle, 
shouting 

" a vice of kings ; 
That from the shelf a precious diadem stole 
And put it in his pocket. 

A King of shreds and patches;" 

when suddenly the ghost appears, saying 

" Do not forget ; this visitation 
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." 

What else can this mean but that Hamlet real- 
ized despite his fierce words against the king, 
that he still felt himself to be a hesitant coward, 
in that the king, against whom he so rashly raved, 
still breathed the breath of life? "Why," he 
must have reasoned in the secret meditations of 
his soul, "am I so brash with words, but so want- 
ing in action? Why, if I can to my mother break 



•EDWIN FORREST AS HAMLET 

To be or not to be; that is the question. 

Act III, Sc. I. 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 65 

all the bounds of filial courtesy, and mercilessly 
chide her for marrying that treacherous, lecher- 
ous villain, can I not spur myself to thrust the 
weapon through him, and thus fulfil the call to 
vengeance to which both heaven and hell invite?" 

Such must have been the thoughts that were 
wandering through his brain when the Ghost ap- 
pears. His mother cries, " 'tis ecstacy : the very 
coinage of your brain," to which charge he makes 
a feeble reply by insisting that if put to the test 
he can repeat the words he has just spoken. But 
all the while it is very apparent that he is but 
spurring himself on to a deed from which his na- 
ture revolts, and in which he shall succeed only 
if he drowns his soul deep enough in melancholy, 
pessimism and despair. 

He loses no occasion to evoke what agony he 
can from every circumstance. When he witnesses 
the warring forces of Fortinbras, he thinks not of 
their glory or achievements, but merely finds in 
them a theme for his own consolation, — an invita- 
tion to profounder depths of foreboding, gloom 
and wretchedness. 

Realizing that war means blood, and mutual as- 
sassination, he studies it only for such symbols as 



66 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

goad him on to bloody deeds and thoughts. "Ex- 
amples gross as earth exhort me," now he cries. 
"How stand I, then, that have a father killed, a 
mother stained ; excitements of my reason and my 
blood, and let all sleep, whilst twenty thousand 
men go to their graves, for a phantasy and trick 
of fame," he coldly meditates, descending to lower 
depths of agony, fuliginous avenues of gloom. 
It is evident he is seized by one thought only, 
that of vengeance, and he must needs nurse it into 
constant life by the fruitful presence of unabated 
melancholy. If for a moment this sullen nurse 
desert him, his native spirit of gaiety and dal- 
liance leaps forth to conquer. At such moments 
some vision of the mind arises that quells all his 
fanciful emotions, and drags him to Cimmerian 
depths of darkness. 

Never was a mind so natively gay, so studiedly 
wretched and demure. Never did a heart in which 
so naturally leaped the fountain of love and ten- 
derness become so stained by the self -determining 
venom of ambition and vengeance, as in this mind- 
begloomed and ill-fated Hamlet. 

However beautiful and bright the world may 
appear he sees in it nothing but a barren prom- 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 67 

ontory, an unweeded garden, in which things rank 
and gross offend the sense. A storm cloud over- 
hangs the golden fretted canopy of the skies hid- 
ing from his soul all their splendor, glory and il- 
lusionment. His mind is a charnel house in which 
prowl but things uncanny and ghoulish, conjured 
from the deep hells of his being, where sit the 
gods of hatred, bitterness and death. Nothing 
invites him to peace ; all harries and distorts with 
monstrous forebodings and ill-omened prophecies. 
His whole life, all his ambition, his wit, his cun- 
ning and deep erudition, are now swallowed up in 
one dizzying, bewildering dream of horror: "O 
from this time forth my thoughts be bloody, or 
be nothing worth" he groans ; f orseeing that the 
shedding of blood alone will quiet the demons that 
tear his breast and madden his brain. 

That one so wholly overwhelmed by a sea of 
troubles should pray for escape through death is 
but natural. One who possessed the spirit of phy- 
sical venturesomness might under such conditions 
seek an opportunity to engage in war, or in scenes 
of wild excitement and invited danger. Were he 
given less to contemplation and more to action he 
would rejoice when he heard the call to duty that 
would remove him from his depths of gloom. 



68 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Not so our Hamlet. 

When the king concludes it is best for his own 
safety and that of the Court that Hamlet accept 
the office of ambassador to England, the proposi- 
tion received Hamlet's disapproval. When he 
meets the forces of Fortinbras, with whose mission 
his spirit is in entire sympathy, instead of cheer- 
fully enlisting, and hastening to the field of action 
that he may bury his sorrow in pursuit of "bat- 
tles, sieges, fortunes," he merely studies them at a 
distance and philosophises on the promptings that 
spur men to deeds of blood. The death which he 
might encounter on battle fields seems to present 
to his foreboding mind no fascination ; but the 
death which a "bare bodkin" might vouchsafe 
him seems to lure him with the charm of agony. 
If he meet an untimely death it must be the work 
of his own hand. For by such a death he would 
be able to perceive and comprehend his own cow- 
ardice and failure. 

Intensely honest and keenly introspective, he 
sees and confesses that the only reason which de- 
cides him against self -slaughter is the "dread of 
something after death," the dread of a dream that 
might arise in that sleep of death that would 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 69 

give him pause. If he suffered death to o'ertake 
him in the bloody waltz of the battle field, he knew 
that he would half lie to himself, by seeming to act 
through duty and fall by necessity. He knew 
that such a death would be virtual suicide, yet it 
would be dishonorable and concealed by a trick 
of cunning. Above all else he would be honest 
with himself ; therefore if he shall escape suffering 
through untimely death it must be by such act 
as he shall consciously and purposely inflict. 

In Hamlet, then, we ever behold even in his pro- 
f oundest depths of gloom the presence and poise 
of the perfect philosopher. He would be glad to 
lose his life if he could part with it by an act of 
God or through an instrumentality uncontrived 
by himself. When he is abjured by all his 
friends from following the Ghost lest it lead him 
to misfortune, he scouts at their warnings, remind- 
ing them that he holds his life at less than a "pin's 
fee." He never acts the coward through physical 
fear. His hesitancy and cowardice arise alone 
from mental scruple and philosophical survey. 

The state or fate of his body gives him but little 
concern. It is merely the final fate of his soul 
that fills him with prophecies of woe. He does not 



70 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

seem to doubt the existence of his soul or its fu- 
ture continuity ; for while he sets his physical life 
at an pin's fee, of his soul, he says like the Ghost 
itself it is immortalr^ Thus in his famous solilo- 
quy on self-slaughter it is the "pale cast of 
thought" that "sicklies o'er the native hue of 
resolution." And that pale cast of thought is 
"the respect that makes calamity of so long life," 
by causing its endurance through the fear of 
"flying to other ills we know not of." In short 
it is the undiscovered country from whose bourn 
no traveller returns that puzzles his will and 
makes him hesitate in his resolution to seek that 
sleep that never wakes. 

But here we meet with what is an inconsistency 
in his logic. Why should Hamlet doubt that un- 
discovered country? Why should he declare that 
from its bourn no traveller returns? Why should 
he, who not only believed that his soul existed, 
but also that it was immortal; who never for a 
moment questioned the theory of the after life, — 
still be so puzzled in mind concerning the con- 
tinuity of his soul's existence if he fled this life? 
One would imagine that none could receive more 
palpable and positive proof of future existence, 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 71 

and its actual state than Hamlet fortunately pos- 
sessed. He was not forced to accept the ipse dic- 
tum of any one ; he need not go to church and 
implicitly obey the instructions of the priest 
against his reason ; he need not turn the pages of 
the Bible for proof of the future world or de- 
scription of its condition. 

Never, we may well believe, did a human being 
confront a more convincing proof of the after 
world than Hamlet. He saw not only an appar- 
ition ; but one whose presence was as familiar to 
him as the living form itself. He saw what pur- 
ported to be the Ghost of his father. More than 
that, he was permitted to examine it and learn that 
it answered in minutest detail the full and perfect 
description of his paternal parent. Not only so, 
but his several friends also witnessed the same 
vision, and like him were absolutely convinced 
of the verisimilitude of the spirit. Nor was this 
all ; for not only "did one rise from the grave" to 
convince him more than could "Moses and the 
prophets ;" but he was further permitted to hold 
a private and long-continued conference with this 
apparition, and thereby satisfy himself by the 
spirit's own voice, testimony and appearance, that 



72 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

in all respects, even the smallest, it was the perfect 
likeness of his father. 

Nor was even this the fullness of the evidence. 
For the spirit spoke to him of the affairs of gov- 
ernment, of the court and things known alone in 
the privacy of the reigning family; of which 
Hamlet was himself part witness, and the remain- 
der of which was easily corroborated. So that 
judged by any of the rules of evidence in the 
courts of justice, one would be forced to render 
a verdict in favor of the Ghost's complete demon- 
stration of his former existence on earth and his 
palpable return thereto. 

Is it not then surprising, in spite of all these 
facts, that Hamlet should still insist no traveller 
had ever returned from the country which to his 
mind was a terra incognita — a country still un- 
discovered? What could he mean by this curious 
declaration — this apparent inconsistency? Ham- 
let never speaks at random when alone and in pos- 
session of his peace of mind. He could not there- 
fore have spoken thoughtlessly when in this 
gloomiest hour of his life, most seriously he con- 
templates the fate of suicide. 

Never perhaps did he more cautiously measure 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 73 

his words and weigh his thoughts. He sank a 
shaft into the profoundest depths of his being 
and sought all the wells of wisdom he possessed. 
He hoped for such response as would give him 
courage and consolation. Instead he hears but 
responses of despair and voices of foreboding. 
"Thus conscience doth to make cowards of us all," 
he cries, at last satisfied that he has been unable to 
penetrate beyond "this bank and shoal of time" 
into the infinite vistas of the invisible Beyond. 
But how can this be? Is Hamlet false to himself, 
or irrationally wilful ; determined to disbelieve all 
and every proof of the after life, regardless of 
whatever source may produce it? 

It seems to me, that for the time being allowing 
Hamlet's rationality and sanity of mind, he must 
either have irreverently and defiantly ignored the 
most awesome and convincing proof of future ex- 
istence the human mind can confront ; or he must 
have felt the force of a certain contrary current 
of reason that caused him to disbelieve or at least 
doubt the reality of the vision he had beheld. 

At this juncture I wish to say that again I 
seem to find in Shakespeare a most amazing anti- 
cipation of modern discovery in scientific psychic 



74 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

research. The proof of the future life, as I have 
said, which Hamlet received was in all respects the 
most complete the human mind could wish. It 
was as complete and absolute as any ever recorded 
in history or even ever borne on the lips of rumor. 
More perfect and satisfying it could not be. The 
fact then that despite all this convincing demon- 
stration Hamlet still doubted, clearly shows that 
when Shakespeare brings his most intellectual and 
philosophical character face to face with the 
problem of the return to earth of those who once 
inhabited the human frame, he makes him finally 
doubt or question it all by the sheer force of rea- 
son. He does not manifest his doubt by denying 
his perception of the apparition ; or that it in 
every manner fully satisfied the most detailed re- 
quirements of his father's likeness, or that others 
had seen it like himself; but he doubts it because 
he has heard that the devil may so fashion his 
form as to deceive the most astute and make them 
believe that what they see is the form of one they 
once had loved. 

Now this unique capacity of the psychic force 
to so affect the alleged medium that it will compel 
the latter to commit unconscious perjury, by 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 75 

swearing to the false appearance of the appar- 
ition, is one of the most recent discoveries in this 
arcane science (if so it may be called). The dis- 
covery which has been made in modern psychical 
research is that the mental hallucination of a 
psychic-subject may take on specific imperson- 
ations of such exactness and true likeness to the 
real personage, that it is difficult to doubt the 
actual presence of the departed. But it has also 
been demonstrated that such hallucinations may 
be artificially produced, so to speak, by the use 
of the mental force known as Suggestion. By the 
mere suggestion of a positive command or per- 
suasion the mind will call up any personage that 
may be sought. The conjurer causes the subject 
to behold, as if actually present in material form, 
whatsoever individual may be desired. Yet there 
is nothing actually present but the thought of the 
conjurer and the obedient mind of the subject.* 



* As an illustration of the amenability of the subliminal 
consciousness of a sensitive to respond to the mental sug- 
gestion of another I quote an incident from Dr. Maxwell's 
"Metaphysical Phenomena." 

" The following is an experiment in the transmission of 
thought which Dr. Maxwell tried with the medium. 

" I gave my hand to M. Maurice to hold, and said to him 
— we had been talking in a vague, general manner of the 



76 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

This recent scientific discovery seems vaguely 
to suggest itself to the mind of Hamlet. Of 
course the theory is not worked out by the author, 
as would not be looked for in the work of a dram- 
atist. But Hamlet seems to know enough of the 
principle, to feel, intuitively, that what he had 
seen may not have been the actual spirit of his 
father, but some false personification, imposed 
upon him as he says by the devil (the ancient 
superstition) or as we would say by some strong 
suggestion (according to modern scientific con- 
clusion). Hamlet's own state of mind was, of 
course, the strong suggestion. His intense men- 
tal suffering because of his father's death, and 
mother's marriage, put him in just such a mental 
condition as to make him amenable to such an hal- 
lucination as would suggest the presence of his 
departed father. His bent of mind is so philo- 
sophical, the poise of his spirit so contemplative, 



plurality of existences, — ' Try and see how I died in my 
previous existence.' 

Unknown to the medium I wrote down on paper the 
words: ' Fall from a horse.' 

" M. Maurice answered: ' I see your life, then you fade 
away into nothingness ; you die from an accident : a carriage 
— no, a horse accident. I see you wearing a shield. You 
fall from your horse, he crushes you to death.' " 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 77 

that he does not permit himself, as would a weaker 
personality, to be led completely captive by what 
he had seen. Notwithstanding all the agony of 
his soul, and the ineffable solace it must have af- 
forded him once again to have seen his honored 
parent, the proof of whose presence was appar- 
ently so palpable; still he refuses to give it ab- 
solute credence or to trust its testimony till he has 
weighed the facts more carefully, and sought out 
corroborative evidence that shall make assurance 
doubly sure. 

We shall better understand the philosophical 
poise of Hamlet's mind if we compare his actions 
under similar circumstances with those of Mac- 
beth, in that other wonderful psychological drama 
of Shakespeare. Hamlet is a man of thought and 
retirement. Macbeth is a man of action and 
worldly interests. Hamlet is a scholar. Mac- 
beth, a warrior and ruler. Hamlet is sensitive, 
positive, intuitive, Macbeth is coarse, immobile, 
dull. Hamlet suffers no individual or circum- 
sance to conquer or control him ; he brushes aside 
confidants, friends, lovers, parents, officers of state 
and the majestic king himself, if they oppose his 
purpose. Macbeth is weak, submissive, over- 



78 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

mastered by the stronger will of his wife, per- 
suaded to the execution of deeds from which he 
revolts, yet is unable to resist because of the 
potent influences that sway him. He is credulous, 
submissive, passive. 

We shall now see how the presence of supposed 
apparitions oppositely affects these two most op- 
posite and perfectly contrasted characters. 
When the ghost of Banquo confronts Macbeth 
as he sits at the head of the banquet table in the 
great hall, instant fright, horror and confusion 
seize him. He beholds Banquo as he imagined 
he last saw him; whom the murderers described 
as "safe in a ditch with twenty trenched gashes 
on his head; the least a death to nature." Con- 
cious of his crime and instinctively a coward, he 
believes beyond contradiction that the real ghost 
of Banquo sits in the empty seat placed in honor 
for him: — "The times have been," he shouts, 
blanched with horror, "that when the brains of 
men were out the man would die ; and there an 
end ; but. now, they rise again, with twenty mortal 
murthers on their crown, and push us from our 
stools !" All Lady Macbeth's calm contempt and 
masculine logic cannot avail in this his hour of 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 79 

most intense confusion. "This is the very paint- 
ing of your fear," she insists, and sarcastically in- 
sinuates, "This is the air-drawn dagger, which 
you said, led you to Duncan." But all of no 
avail. He is sure it is the real Banquo, murdered, 
returned as an impalpable spirit. "Can such 
things be, and overcome us like a summer's cloud, 
without our special wonder," he gasps, seeing that 
the undisquieted banqueters "can keep the natural 
ruby of their cheeks, while his are blanched with 
fear?" None in that vast festival hall beholds the 
ghost save Macbeth. 

But before Hamlet himself beheld the ghost of 
his father he had already been prepared for its 
reception by the assurance of his faithful and 
trustworthy friends that they had truly witnessed 
it. Nevertherless Hamlet cannot at last persuade 
himself that it was real or to be obeyed without 
further assurance. But Macbeth is so readily 
convinced, despite his temporary doubts, that he 
stakes his life and fortune on the teaching and 
guidance of uncanny powers, who employ the 
witches as their agents, and lead him step by step 
to final ruin. 

Doubtless the chief cause of the different tern- 



80 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

peramental disposition toward the ghost, between 
Hamlet and Macbeth, is to be found in the free- 
dom of the one from guilt and the consciousness 
of "deep damnation" in the other. But it was 
Hamlet's lofty sensitiveness and intellectual ex- 
altedness which saved him in this parlous time. 
The revolt of his mind against the onslaught of 
his emotions was his succorer. Weak people are 
so easily appalled by what profess to be visit- 
ations from the unseen realm, that they suffer not 
themselves to analyze and apprehend the nature 
of the vision they behold. Their emotions are 
their instructors and inspirers and what these 
command they obey. The multitude who are led 
astray by spiritistic phenomena are thus the 
dupes of their feelings, fearing to look beyond 
what their eyes seem to behold. But Hamlet was 
determined to study the phenomenon be it "a 
spirit of health or goblin damned." 

And all too well he knew he was in a mental 
condition to invite such illusions. He knew his 
"weakness and melancholy" were potent forces 
wherewith to conjure what might purport to be 
such spirits as might damn him. For his mel- 
ancholy was apparnently not constitutional but 



EDMUND KEAN AS HAMLET 

Unhand me, gentlemen ; 
By heaven! I'll make a ghost of him that lets 
me! Act I, Sc. IV. 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 81 

brought on by a "sea of troubles," against which 
he is tempted "to take up arms," yet "lacks the 
gall to make oppression bitter." The king 
clearly intimates that since the time of the death 
of his father, Hamlet is a completely transformed 
individual, whose ceaseless gloom forebodes ill to 
all. To Rosencrantz and Guilderstern, he says, 
when pleading with them for their friendly inter- 
cession to learn the secret of Hamlet's disconsolate 
state, "Something have you heard of Hamlet's 
transformation ; so, I call it ; sith not the exterior 
nor the inward man resembles what it was. What 
it should be more than his father's death that hath 
thus put him so much from the understanding 
of himself, I cannot dream of." 

Here then we have the key to the origin of 
Hamlet's weakness and melancholy. It is not 
temperamental or congenital with him. It was all 
brought on, stage by stage, through the sudden 
and damnable taking off of his honored father. 
We are not permitted, however, to conclude that it 
was only the information of the murder of his 
father gotten from the ghost, that has unsettled 
his mental calm and caused his weakness. For 
when he first appears he is already clothed with 



82 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the gloomy mantle of woe, and is the cause of his 
royal mother's worry. But doubtless the inform- 
ation which the ghost had given him turned his 
head and caused him to realize not only that his 
natural manners had been altered but the very 
purpose and necessity of his life. A new motive 
now is his ruling passion — vengeance. Before, 
grief o'ermastered him. But now the iron has so 
entered his veins that his whole being is roused to 
a deed from which his nature instinctively revolts. 
The result is that he wavers between two ways. 
Whether he shall do what the spirit commanded, 
kill his uncle, and thus avenge his father, and 
pacify his soul, or, which is far more to his mental 
liking, flee a duty so repulsive, and by his own 
hand sink into the eternal sleep of death, is the 
problem he alone must solve. Although the 
apparition of the ghost has smitten him with an 
appalling sense of duty; although he fully re- 
alizes that the king is guilty notwithstanding he 
requires more ocular proof before he dare to act ; 
still, he feels, despite all the evidence and the call 
of heaven and hell to action, he would much pre- 
fer to end his life by a "bare bodkin" and with 
it "all the heart ache and the thousand natural 
shocks that flesh is heir to." 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 83 

This is the thought apparently that is conquer- 
ing his soul when he is closeted with his mother 
and pouring on her head the hot chastisement of 
his burning words. He knows, within the deep 
centre of his being, that however fiercely he is 
storming at her, he shall at last fail in duty ; for 
he would rather persuade himself that it is nobler 
in the mind to take up arms against a sea of 
troubles and by opposing end them when wrapped 
in the mantle of eternal sleep. With that thought 
beclouding his mind the ghost appears again, 
when closeted with his mother, reminding him that 
the visitation is merely to whet his almost "blunted 
purpose." He himself reveals his own feelings 
when he exclaims to the apparition, "Do you not 
come your tardy son to chide, that, laps'd in time 
and passion, lets go by the important acting of 
your dread command?" 

Thus apparently the dream and desire of 
suicide have so bewitched him that its contempla- 
tion had almost blunted his former passion for 
vengeance on the murderer of his father. Never- 
theless, as in all other situations, with him "the 
pale cast of thought sicklies o'er the native hue 
of resolution ;" for he finds himself quite as in- 



84 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

capable of selfmurder as of the murder of his 
uncle. And for the same reason. Because he is 
so much the scholar, the profound and philos- 
ophical thinker, notwithstanding his native 
skepticism, that he leads himself away from action 
by pursuing a winding avenue of metaphysical 
speculation. He would cheerfully welcome death 
by his own hand if only he knew the sleep were 
final. But the danger of such dreams, when we 
have shuffled off this mortal coil, as must give us 
pause, is the cue that leads him safely from the 
deed. 

Yet what dreams could be in the after life that 
would give him pause? He accuses himself of 
much that is evil ; but it is manifestly the declar- 
ation of an oversensitive conscience. He says to 
Ophelia, when he is trying to persuade her that 
their mating were fatal to them both, "I am my- 
self indifferent honest, yet I could accuse me of 
such things it were better my mother had not 
borne me ; I am very proud, ambitious, revenge- 
ful, with more offences at my back than I have 
thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them 
shape or time to act them in." Yet there is none 
other who accuses him; nor are we led by the 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 85 

story of the drama to think of him other than, 
when normal, as a perfect gentleman with most 
kindly heart and ennobled soul. Still he declares 
he has "bad dreams" and he fears that the dreams 
of the sleep of death might eternally annoy him. 

What are those dreams? 

Before we study that problem, let us not fail 
to notice that he seems but little annoyed by the 
possibility of physical sufferings in the world be- 
yond. He has been nursed in the grim teachings 
of mediaevalism, when the theology of Anselm 
and Augustine prevailed. The ghost had re- 
minded him of the tortures to which he himself 
was subjected. "My hour is almost come when 
I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must ren- 
der up myself." 

But when thinking of the possible horrors of 
the coming life such physical severities and suf- 
ferings seem far from Hamlet's contemplation. 
He fears only the dreams. He foresees spiritual 
and moral horrors, but of physical torment he 
cares but little. This evidences a most advanced 
and indifferent mood in one reared in the thoughts 
of that age. But what are the dreams he fears 
that seem to give him pause? It occurs to me 



86 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

that the one abiding "dream" he most fears is the 
everlasting consciousness that he had refused t6 
perform the duty laid upon him by his murdered 
father, and that if he leaves this life and fails to 
execute it his conscience will forever and forever 
torment and confound him. Does he mean this, or 
does he mean that he will first execute the deed of 
murder and then, having satisfied the grim com- 
mand of his father's ghost, thrust the bare bod- 
kin through his own breast and end the memory 
of sorrows ? Then would he also continue to have 
bad dreams? Would then the dream of the foul 
slaughter of another coupled with his own self 
slaughter so harrow and torment him that he 
would never find peace in all the future? 

We cannot tell from the words of Hamlet what 
were his inmost thoughts on this grave theme. 
We may conclude, however, from what he says 
that he would never be able to forgive himself 
throughout endless ages for having violated the 
promise to his father's spirit if he be derelict in 
duty ; that the one vast burden he feels weighing 
down his life, from which he recoils, yet which he 
must needs perform, (the murder of his uncle), 
will haunt him with gruesome memory from which 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 87 

not all the years beyond the grave will free him. 
If we take this view then Hamlet reveals to us a 
sensitively conscientious nature, which would throw 
some light on his morals and explain to a degree 
the aggravating dilatoriness and irresolution of 
his mind. He wishes to obey his father's com- 
mand, because he is persuaded both that it was his 
father who commanded him and that the charge 
against his uncle is true. Yet to do this deed 
would blacken his soul, because the memory of it 
would haunt his spirit forever. 

Such a conclusion however is hardly in keeping 
with other traits in his character. For we see in 
the third act, while closeted alone with his 
mother, he is suddenly excited by the cry of Pol- 
onius for help, and in an instant slays him, yet 
does not thereafter seriously mourn the deed. 
Surely if having killed so innocent a man (how- 
beit a boresome and tedious old fool) gives rise 
to no compunction in his heart, and indeed ap- 
parently affects him no more than "any the most 
common thing in life," we can but easily imagine 
that the slaying of one so reprehensible in his eyes 
as his murderous uncle, would afford him not the 
slightest shadow of remorse. If ever one, who is 



88 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

even most delicately sensitive in matters of con- 
science, might feel himself half-justified in the act 
of murder it would be this forlorn and woe-be- 
stranded Hamlet. Nay, it cannot be the dread of 
the smitings of a bitter and chastised conscience 
that gives him pause. It cannot be that he halts 
at murder because he fears the everlasting mem- 
ory of it. There is something else that puzzles 
his uncertain will. 

In my judgment it is nothing more than the 
general dread of the consequence of death itself, 
ever common to the race. But this dread was in 
Hamlet especially keen, because of his extra- 
ordinary imagination and penetrating acumen. 
What was to others but fancy or flitting shadow 
was to him opaque substance and reality. So in- 
trospective was his mind that he could penetrate 
the deepest fathoms of his being and discern the 
very waters of his soul traverse their several chan- 
nels. He could follow the wanderings of his body 
beyond the grave and see it perhaps "imprison'd 
in the viewless winds, and blown with restless vio- 
lence round about the pendant world." Nay, he 
could even feel, what is worse, that his spirit 
would never find a resting place, but stormed and 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 89 

smitten by unabated and tumultuous forces, which 
inhabit the vacuous realms of space, would be ever 
ill at ease, the butt of chance and sport of for- 
tune. 

"For in that sleep of death what dreams may 
come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil!" 
Ah yes, what dreams! Dreams that may haunt 
us like everlasting nightmares, which like them 
we shall be unable to o'ermaster, waiting for the 
never coming morn; dreams which, mingling 
memory and prophecy, shall in one instant recall 
all the evil of our past lives and forecast the con- 
sequential horrors that yet await us. Who that 
knows the irresponsibility of dreams, how they 
cannot be ordered or controlled, but come and go 
as the idle wind for good or ill, would willingly 
cast his fate in such a world where dreams are 
perennial, and fact is never realised! Who 
would willingly enter such a wild phantas- 
magoria of images, conjured by torture, fear and 
ignorance ; who that loves his peace of mind and 
the pursuit of knowledge, would venture on that 
"barren promontory," round which the gloom of 
everlasting shadow gathers and the howling tem- 
pests of eternity forever boom ! This was the 



90 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

dread, I take it, "of something after death" that 
haunted and horrified the mind of Hamlet as it 
does of all imaginative souls, and gave him pause. 
^ Whatever else the after life might be, the very 
chance of its being but a life of dreams, as un- 
rulable and irrational as our dreams o'night this 
side of the grave, — this alone, he ponders, was 
enough to make him sheath his bodkin in a scab- 
bard. After all 'tis better to bear the ills we have 
than fly to others that we know not of, especially 
till our appointed time, when we shall all learn 
the final truth. 

^ Thus whatever else he may be in action or ir- 
resolution, in thought and philosophy Hamlet is 
ever most sane and rational. Though in imagin- 
ation he points the weapon to his breast to cut 
out its heart of gloom, his head is balanced and 
thus far his reason is his rescue. He has learned, 
what we must all sometimes learn, and what it 
would perhaps be well for the entire race if it 
always realised. We cannot better this life by 
flying from it. We know not that we can better 
our fate by dashing out our brains and ventur- 
ing on the fortunes of an undiscovered realm. 
Hence why should we cast away that which is in 



MEDITATION ON SUICIDE 91 

hand, and which we know, for what is unseen and 
must forever be unknown. Better indeed we en- 
dure, lest we fly to what to endure may be a thou- 
sand fold more horrible. While here, we know 
we have at least a chance to win; we may con- 
quer circumstance and finally turn sorrow into 
joy, tears into laughter. But yonder? Who 
shall say what fate may pall us? In front of 
yonder unfrequented bourn forever hangs the cur- 
tain of uncertainty. What is behind it none can 
tell. What actors there strut or grovel on the 
invisible stage no returning visitors report. 
Whether there be tragedy or comedy, or the even 
balance of both, or chronicles of such indescrib- 
able suffering as the natural mind can ill-conceive, 
who shall say? Therefore where ignorance is bliss 
'tis folly to be wise. The grave is silent. The 
heavens echo not. Await then thy fate, impatient 
man, and enter not till the gates are lifted by the 
hands of time. 



IV 

THE FATE OF OPHELIA 
A STUDY IN INSANITY 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 

'T^O behold the shattered remnants of a once 
■*■ splendid piece of art is a cause for lamenta- 
tion and regret. Not only does one mourn the loss 
of the handiwork, (to commune with which may 
often transport the mind beyond the sodden state 
of ordinary life), but as well the waste of ardu- 
ous toil, mental anxiety, and force of accumu- 
lated ideals, which the artist utilized in its pro- 
duction. Who, when viewing the ruins of a statue 
but feels that a life has gone out — a life not of the 
feelingless marble — but a life which its spiritual 
creator conjured and breathed into it, for our joy 
and edification? On reviewing the great canvasses 
of art, on which are spread in matchless colors 
the dreams and ideals of the painter, who but feels 
that each minutest tint reveals the passion of the 
artist's heart, while the harmonious ensemble is 
the record of his life compressed into picturesque 
epitome, symbolical of all his yearnings and am- 
bitions? 

When such great masterpieces crumble in dust 
or evaporate in smoke and flame, what loss is here 
of such storage of thoughts and dreams, hot tears 
95 



96 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

and bloody sweat, agonizing hopes and the an- 
guish of despair, as none but geniuses endure, 
who must needs pay the price of glory in the coin 
of hardship ! He who beholds the ruin of a work 
of art unaffected — who does not feel his heart- 
strings bruised, his soul cast down — is still a sav- 
age, his mind on a level with the beasts. Imagine 
if you can a buffoon tearing in shreds a Madonna 
of Angelo or a Galataea of Raphael, and would 
you not feel that you beheld a deed somewhat akin 
to murder, and your heart sicken and grow weak 
in sight of the outrage? Instinctively we feel 
that creation is divine, and to ruin a work of art 
is to desecrate an altar of divinity. 

But if such be our unassuaged emotions in the 
presence of a ruin of inanimate and voiceless art, 
what must we feel when we behold the sudden ruin- 
ation of a human mind, itself the seat of genius, 
and destined creator of deathless art? How sad 
it seems that some of the greatest of human minds 
have ended their feverish days in the illusionment 
of vacuous insanity. It is difficult to realize that 
a mind, once potent with thought and creative 
energy, should like a vacuum become suddenly 
empty, or filled with but vapory shadows and 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 97 

glimmering nothings. Where now is the mind, 
where the brain, of such pathetic ruins of sublime 
genius ! 

When we think of geniuses like Nietsche, de 
Maupassant, Swift and Cowper, as well as many 
others who could be mentioned, whose intellectual 
splendor once illumined the world, going out in 
utter darkness, wrapped in a cloud of mental 
gloom, it must needs cause us to meditate on the 
frailty of the human mind, and the utter disap- 
pointment that oft the brightest promises of life 
afford. And yet we do not mourn the loss of 
genius only (the final vacuity of a brain that once 
throbbed with the radiance of divine inspiration), 
but likewise the loss of any degree of reason that 
once proudly sat on the humblest brain of man. 

Who can describe the sensations that o'ertake 
us when we are brought suddenly to the realiza- 
tion of the shattered mind of one whom we love, 
whose beauty once enthralled us, whose clear mind 
and kindly sympathy never failed to befriend us? 
To look upon the pale and inexpressive brow of 
such an one, into his glassy, viewless eyes, to hear 
his lips utter senseless speech, from which once 
emanated wisdom and sobriety; to hear him con- 



98 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

jure from the "vasty deep" of his imagination 
harrowing scenes of horror and frightful fore- 
bodings of approaching danger; to witness his 
utter transformation from the statehood and 
glory of a god to that of a grovelling beast or 
the senility of decrepit age; is indeed to cause 
"tears, seven times salt, to burn out the sense and 
virtue of one's eyes." 

Yet where in all literature shall we discover a 
more intensely pathetic and overwhelming por- 
traiture of such utter decadence of reason, purity 
and honor, in an artless and heaven born maid, 
than as the master hand has depicted it for us in 
the beautiful and fair Ophelia ? Here was a child 
as lithe and lissom as a lily, as sweet as a rose-leaf, 
as pure as the heart of a crystal, as bewitching as 
a Grecian goddess, suddenly smitten by cruel 
grief into mental vacuity and moral depravity. 
She whose breath was ever soft as a vernal 
zephyr's, whose words were chaste as unsullied 
snow, whose gaze was winsome and unsuggestive 
as a fawn's, is suddenly so changed that from 
those same pure lips now leap ribald songs and 
insinuating speech, and from those eyes longing 
looks that are not impelled by thoughts of inno- 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 99 

cence. O child of ill-begotten love and ill-favor- 
ing fortune, what sinister fate was it that smote 
thee, what gloomy monster of the Invisible o'er- 
mantled and deflowered thee? This shall be our 
study for a brief period in these pages. 

In studying the madness of Ophelia we must 
not forget that we are investigating an actual 
case of insanity, portrayed with unfailing accu- 
racy whether viewed from a pathological or a psy- 
chological standpoint. Shakespeare is ever so 
much the artist that he never imposes upon us, for 
facts or impressions, what afterwards we shall be 
forced to reject and label as but the vaporings of 
ignorance. He knows the laws of the human 
mind, no less than those of the human body, so 
well, that when he depicts the various possible 
states of mental transformation, he ever intro- 
duces with lucid accuracy the exact points of dif- 
ference and contra-distinguishment. If, for ex- 
ample, we examine the mental states of Hamlet, 
Macbeth, Ophelia, and King Lear, all of whom 
evidence certain stages of mental aberration, we 
shall find the differences so finely drawn, the men- 
tal divergence from normal equilibrium so deftly 
indicated, that each will easily drop into its ap- 
propriate medical classification of insanity. 



100 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

The causes of human madness are very nu- 
merous, and are usually divided into pathological 
and psychological. Not that these two classifica- 
tions are to be considered distinct, for they usu- 
ally conjoin, but that the origin of individual 
cases can often be traced directly either to some 
physical disease or to some mental or psychologi- 
cal condition. One can easily see that Lear's 
madness and that of Ophelia, originating in a 
psychological cause, rapidly develop into patho- 
logical stages of an extreme character. On the 
contrary, if we are to construe Hamlet and Mac- 
beth as insane, we must conclude that their states 
of madness, of whatever degree they may be, are 
almost purely psychological. Hence their intel- 
lect and reason are but little affected, for no pal- 
pable disease of the brain manifests itself. But 
in the case of both Ophelia and Lear, although 
extreme grief in both characters is the immediate 
cause of their madness, their brains utterly give 
way and become so diseased that death directly 
follows. 

Dr. Tuke says: "The mental symptoms of ac- 
quired insanity have been classified from the time 
of Pinel as mania, melancholia and dementia, ac- 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 101 

cording as exaltation or depression of feeling, or 
weakness of intellect, presents itself most promi- 
nently in a given case. To these have been added 
delusional insanity, spoken of by certain authors 
as monomonia. However, all such when finally 
analyzed are reducible to the primitive melancho- 
lia, mania and dementia." 

That is, the states known as melancholia and 
mania, arise from the intense alterations of the 
feelings caused by some exciting stimulus, and 
are manifested in either extreme depression or ex- 
traordinary exaltation. In mania, that is in the 
state of insanity known as that of the maniac, 
the subject raves and conceives himself in a con- 
dition of indescribable misery brought on by im- 
aginary but to him most real and overpowering 
causes. His brain is excited to its utmost ten- 
sion, he suffers with almost constant sleeplessness, 
and his nervous stability completely shattered. 

But the insanity of the hypochondriac or the 
melancholiac manifests itself in symptoms pre- 
cisely opposite to these. The subject then experi- 
ences most profound and suffocating feelings of 
depression and both physical and mental gloom; 
he loses all interest in the ordinary affairs of life, 



102 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

disregards his friends and former fellows, concen- 
trates his feelings and thoughts exclusively upon 
himself, and delights in the torture which the ag- 
gravation of his emotions of misery create within 
him. 

The state of insanity known as dementia is more 
directly the result of intellectual aberration, and 
evidences its symptoms in confusion and irregu- 
larity of thought, in the utter dethronement of 
the rational faculties, and the subject "becomes 
indifferent to social considerations, apathetic and 
neglectful of the personal and family duties, 
evinces dislike and suspicion of friends and rela- 
tives, and may betake himself to excess in alco- 
holic stimulants and other forms of dissipation." 
The authorities all agree, however, that "intel- 
lectual insanity never exists without moral per- 
version." 

It is quite manifest, if we are to accept this 
classification as authoritative and correct, that the 
class of the insane under which Ophelia's condition 
would fall, must be that of melancholia. Hers 
was distinctly and emphaticaly an aberration of 
the emotions; her mental dethronement was the 
direct and undisguised effect of her emotional 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 103 

misery brought on by domestic and social causes 
that were sufficient easily to overcome a nature 
as delicate, sympathetic and tender as was hers. 

Her heart, as that of Lear, literally broke, and 
with it cracked her brain. When we recall that 
she was a mere child, probably yet in her "teens," 
who for all we are told had never but one lover and 
one whom she regarded as "the glass of fashion 
and the mould of form" ; and then remember that 
this lover not only proved faithless and cruel to 
her, but became at last the avowed and indifferent 
murderer of her father ; we discover cause enough 
to shatter the mental equilibrium of one much 
sturdier, and built on coarser and far more ma- 
terial lines than she. 

She is so much in love with Hamlet, although 
in the play she never openly confesses her love, 
that when he rebukes and casts her off, she can 
only sink under the blow, bemoaning her fate, but 
never chiding or accusing him. "O woe is me to 
have seen what I have seen; to see what I see," 
she mournfully wails, fainting at the evidence of 
his mind distraught, as she thinks, yet regarding 
him so much a god, she dare not drag him from 
his lofty pedestal and reprimand him at her feet. 



104 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

She believes utterly in his nobility of mind, his 
superior morals, his exalted purpose. He is in- 
deed her god — her ideal. Nothing that he could 
do would destroy her admiration; were he indeed 
a god she could not more adore him ; were he less 
than man she could not in imagination lift him to 
a higher state of honorable manhood than that in 
which she holds him. Hers is a love unfathom- 
able, whose depths the plummet-line of no intellect 
could ever sound, and which the shores of the hu- 
man heart could not confine. 

When then this love is unrequited; when this 
god of all her devotions and confessions, this 
paragon of perfections, this ideal of manli- 
ness and magnanimity, falls from his lofty 
throne besmeared with the blood of her slain 
parent; it is nothing marvellous that a heart, 
which could contain no more misery in its slen- 
der chalice, should break, and with it the brain, 
whose kindly thoughts could worship only him. 
She could not hate him ; her love was too o'ermas- 
tering. She could not chide him ; for her tongue 
had learned naught but the lispings of childish 
adoration; she could not suspect him; for love 
is blind, and sees in sin but human frailty, in cru- 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 105 

elty but passing passion. For that great sin — the 
murdering of her father — she could but pity, pity 
him — forever crying "O what a noble mind is here 
o'erthrown," whose "most sovereign reason, like 
sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh" reveal 
"his blown youth blasted with ecstacy !" 

She could pity — and pitying forgive, and for- 
giving — die for love's sake on his brave but 
blighted breast. She is the efflorescent fullness 
and embodiment of love, revealing its innate weak- 
ness and degeneracy, no less than its beauty and 
ennoblement. Love is to her the world, and all 
that it contains; and, when love is blasted then 
the world bursts like a pricked bubble, and dis- 
solves in misty vapor. 

That such love is a disease is too well evinced 
in the persistent tendency to sadness and melan- 
choly such erotic states invariably generate. If 
the love of youth were a thoroughly healthful con- 
dition it would not easily incline its victims to in- 
sanity and suicide, but would rather quicken the 
brain, and solidify instead of dissipate the tissues 
of the nerves. I believe the pathology of love is 
yet to be learned by the wise of the race and they 
shall then know that all that passes as love, espec- 



106 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



ially in early youth, is far from being beneficial 
to its possessor, but is rather the source of fre- 
quent disease and deterioration. 

" Bitter indeed ; for sad experience shows, 
That love repulsed exceeds all other woes. 
From his sad brow the wonted cheer is fled, 
Low on his breast declines his drooping head; 
Nor can he find, while grief each sense o'erbears, 
Voice for his plaint, or moisture for his tears. 
Impatient Sorrow seeks its way to force, 
But with too eager haste retards its course. 
Each thought augments his wound's deep-rankling 

smart, 
And sudden coldness freezes 'round his heart; 
While, miserable fate ! the godlike light 
Of reason sinks eclipsed in endless night." 

It is a remarkable fact, which shall some time 
call for more detailed and analytic statement, that 
all of Shakespeare's great lovers met with grim 
fatalities, and found the issue of their passion in 
the deep sluices of sorrow, suicide or tragic death. 
Whether it be Ophelia, Juliet, Cleopatra, Desde- 
mona, in whatever clime, of whatever race, great 
as is their love their misery is as great, the pro- 
founder their passion the speedier it leads them 
down the shadowy way of suicide or death. But 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 107 

not so the love of Miranda, of Portia or Nerissa, 
of Rosalind, or any of the heroes or heroines of 
his jovial comedies. 

Does Shakespeare in this curious fact intimate 
his suspicion of an obscure law of life, namely, 
that when the erotic passion gives rise to sadness, 
misery and melancholy, it is a serious and danger- 
ous disease; but so long as it exhilarates and ex- 
alts the emotions and mental functions, it is 
healthful and invigorating? I am not prepared 
-to say that this is a final conclusion of mine in re- 
viewing Shakespeare's marvellous incarnations of 
love, but it seems to me to be quite plainly inti- 
mated on the surface of his work, and undoubt- 
edly to have been a part of his great scheme of 
education. Whether Shakespeare knew it or not ; 
or whether it was mere accident and the result of 
his intuitive apprehension of natural law, he so 
cleverly classified the various qualities and strata 
of love, and always so faithfully delineated their 
characteristics and history, that this much we now 
know, his climaxes were always true to life 
itself, and the master passion never possessed a 
more trustworthy historian or analyst than this 
universal genius of the ages. 



108 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Undoubtedly, when love overpowers all the 
sturdier passions of the breast, when it causes the 
mind to quiver and "lose the name of action," 
when it palsies the heart, slackens the pulses of 
the veins and weakens the tension of the nerves, 
so that reason falters and the affairs of earth sink 
into kaleidescopic and bewildering confusion, it 
can be regarded as little else than a disease, whose 
symptoms are sufficient to alarm the wary and 
enquiring. 

All tendencies to melancholy should be studi- 
ously and vigorously avoided. Melancholy is in 
every sense of the word a degenerative disposition. 
If it is not in itself a disease it is a direct cause of 
pathological conditions, which have caused insuf- 
ferable misery to the race. Melancholy is always 
either itself actual insanity or the sure road that 
leads to it. The victim of melancholia unre- 
deemed is sure finally to enter the state of utter 
mental vacuity and emotional aberration, from 
which final reclamation may be impossible. There- 
fore when love exhibits this disposition it may be 
recognized as an initial disease whose future is 
fraught with danger and evil prophecy. It is, 
however, a most delicate and difficult disease to 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 109 

conquer. No medicine of "gross earth" can min- 
ister to it ; no physical force, or cold intellectual 
discourse can affect it. All of Laertes' kindly ad- 
vice or Polonius' bitter rebuke could not mollify 
the passion in the tender heart of fair Ophelia. 
Under the spell of Hamlet she was irresponsible; 
his eye was like a radiant star that held her cap- 
tive in its glorious orbit, or like a basilisk's which 
enchanted, hypnotized and slew her. 

If we knew enough of the laws of the mind and 
the heart we might perhaps be justified in con- 
cluding that whenever love engenders in the hu- 
man breast the emotions of intense sadness and 
approaching melancholy it may be nature's warn- 
ing — the cry of the faithful guide that the pre- 
cipice is just beyond where death lurks with in- 
ordinate desire. It would be natural to suppose 
that where love engenders cheerfulness and hope* 
buoyancy and energy, it is a healthful passion, 
and will lead the possessor on to happiness and 
success ; but that where it is big with gloom, de- 
spair and despondency, it casts ahead its shadows 
that prophesy a fate fraught with woe and in- 
viting to self-slaughter. 

From this it is but logical to conclude that love 



110 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

is not only a purely psychological state which al- 
ways exhibits its effects in the physiological con- 
dition of man, but that it originates in a pure sub- 
jective stratum of the mind, whose laws we know 
are curious and arcane. 

In the subjective realm of the mind are con- 
tained, as in a reservoir, all the impressions of 
past lives, and the current exercises both of mind 
and body, which at times are unexpectedly re- 
leased and leap forth with surprising consequence. 
There are times when the normal mind gives way, 
and the subjective or sub-normal mind gaining the 
sovereignty sways the entire organism in a man- 
ner wholly foreign to its ordinary character. 
There are what are known as secondary personal- 
ities in each of us, which have been generated and 
developed, along with our ordinary conscious per- 
sonalities, out of materials of which we are little 
if at all aware, and which when they become mani- 
fest are a total surprise and frequently a com- 
plete contradiction to our known personalities. 
Psychologically, insanity is now defined as a state 
in which the sub-normal mind has gained the as- 
cendancy, and the normal mind been partially or 
totally suppressed. 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 111 

The subjective or sub-normal mind is with- 
out the power of conscious reason or self- 
control. It operates much like a machine, fol- 
lowing the course of whatever impressions or 
suggestions may be made to play upon it. At 
such times the mind is incapable of distinguishing 
between the actual and the apparent, between 
shadow and substance, between dream and 
thought. It operates as it does in our nightly 
dreams, when we enter into a wholly foreign world 
of experience, and see and feel things of which 
in our wakeful states we are incapable. 

Now doubtless nowhere else in literature do we 
find this pathetic and most amazing state of the 
mind more perfectly portrayed than in Shakes- 
peare's characters. Whether he wished to have 
us understand that the alleged madness of Ham- 
let was mere pretense or an actual condition, nev- 
ertheless he makes Hamlet in all respects act the 
perfect part of a madman when he leaves off the 
control of his normal mind, and apparently suf- 
fers his sub-normal consciousness to hold sover- 
eign sway. At such times he says things that are 
so utterly foreign to his ordinary character their 
very utterance frightens his hearers into the be- 



112 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

lief of his total and incurable madness. We shall 
in the next lecture discuss the problem of Ham- 
let's insanity, and therefore at this juncture shall 
comment no further upon it. 

But in his so-called pretended madness Shakes- 
peare causes him to exhibit the presence of the 
same psychological law as does Ophelia in her 
state of actual insanity. In each case there rise 
from the deeps of the unconscious reservoir of 
past experience such forms of thought and fumes 
of passion as utterly dissipate the normal stabil- 
ity of the mind and cause it to assume an atmo- 
sphere of bewilderment and perplexing irration- 
ality. 

When Hamlet charges Ophelia with false 
painting, and dangerous lapses from chastity, 
whether mad or not, he undoubtedly is under the 
influence of thoughts which had frequently flitted 
through his mind, but to which he had never given 
outward expression ; and in these moments of ex- 
treme excitement, when the normal reason is sup- 
pressed, they leap into prominence and mount 
the throne of his consciousness. Then, ere he is 
aware, they have sprung from his lips, and his 
mouth gives expression to what had heretofore 



HENRY IRVING AS HAMLET 

Aye, sir ; to be honest as this world goes is to 
be as one man picked out of ten thousand. 

Act II, Sc. II. 






THE FATE OF OPHELIA 113 

lain silent in the unruffled depths of his residu- 
ary memory. This law it seems to me fully ac- 
counts for Ophelia's strange and unwonted ex- 
pressions of ribaldry in song and comment after 
she is demented, when she glides like a wandering 
sylph on the scene to horrify and confound all 
who hear her. These songs may have been sung 
to her by some crude and uncultured nurse, who 
not knowing the injury she was inflicting on her 
infant mind, filled it with leud and salacious im- 
ages, which had lain undisturbed through all these 
years, and were aroused to conscious expression 
only after reason and the control of the will were 
frustrated. This condition frequently presents 
itself in feverish patients, or hysterical subjects 
half demented with pain. Then thoughts and 
images which for years may have lain buried in 
their unconscious memories, suddenly come to the 
surface and clamor for expression. Then the 
purest lips become the mouthpiece of profanity 
and base vulgarisms; the chastest tongue is sud- 
denly converted into an instrument of ribaldry 
and lecherous imaginings; and apparently the 
body would willingly yield to demands from 
which in its normal state it would flee in horror 
and exasperation. 



114 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

When therefore we behold the spotless and 
beautiful Ophelia so utterly devoid of reason and 
propriety as to give expression to thoughts, 
which, when she was herself, she had as lief die as 
to speak, we see how perfectly and with what 
faultless art the matchless master has portrayed 
her. She is indeed mad, mad, beyond redemption. 
She recognizes no one whom she once held most 
dear. 

It is sickening enough to behold her glid- 
ing past the king and queen, as if she never knew 
them, and singing to them her pathetic snatches 
of childish song ; but when at last her brother en- 
ters, and even to him also her mind is an utter 
blank, and she sings and plays with him in the 
same distant and indifferent manner as with all 
the rest ; when she gives him rosemary for remem- 
brance and scatters the wild flowers at his feet; 
we see how absolutely her reason is dethroned, how 
vacant her brain, how feelingless, because of un- 
utterable misery, is her broken heart. And when 
at last that stormy scene occurs, when Hamlet, 
returned, finds his fair Ophelia dead and buried, 
and leaps into the grave to wrestle with her 
vengeful brother, who can doubt that could she 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 115 

arise in her mournful shroud and gaze upon them, 
they would both appear but as struggling shad- 
ows, in whom she would recognize neither her 
brother nor her adorable lover? 

What symbols of human passion have we here ! 
The sad Ophelia (incarnation of beauty, tender- 
ness and forgiveness, drowned of her own vacant 
volition) ; the passionate brother in anger wrest- 
ling with the protesting lover, who is himself the 
direct cause of her overthrow and of the brother's 
deplorable fate. The strain of human suffering 
has been drawn so far that the pall of madness 
seems to have fallen on them all. Each of the 
struggling men has apparently lost his reason in 
the sudden burst of angry passion, while at their 
feet deep within the covering earth lay the body 
of her who was indeed the victim of a madness 
that dragged her in its clutches to the fatal pond. 

The gloom of the tragedy, at this juncture, 
grows so thick and maudlin it almost sickens one 
with sympathetic pain. We cannot hate or traduce 
Hamlet, the actual though unwitting cause of all 
this woe, for we feel his own suffering is so great 
that in entangling him it also caught in its net 
all with whom he came in contact. Like Ophelia, 



116 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

we can only pity, and scarcely blame him. But 
without assuming, as she did, that he is at least 
somewhat tinged with that same madness that he 
caused in her, we could but impatiently restrain 
ourselves from cursing him and crying down ven- 
geance on his head. The very fact that we must 
pity him proves that instinctively we feel he is 
not wholly subject to his own control, and there- 
fore not entirely responsible for his bloody and 
distracting deeds. But of this more in our next 
lecture. 

For Laertes we can have but the utmost sympa- 
thy. Deprived of a devoted father and a most 
chaste and loving sister, what wonder his natural 
impulse was to avenge the murderer at the instant 
of his discovery. When he meets his sister dis- 
traught, and anon beholds her body brought in 
dead from the watery grave, what wonder his 
heart bursts ; and when there appears a rival of 
his lamentations, in whom he discovers the mur- 
derer of his father and the false lover of his sister, 
it is but natural he should become instantly wild 
with furious anger and seek to slay him on the 
spot. 

And yet when we recall that these two men so 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 117 

wholly forgot the sanctity of the scene at which 
they enacted the drama of their emotions, when 
we recall that it was at the grave of Ophelia 
where they fought with such harrowing passion, 
it appeals to us as the very climax of the pathetic 
and achieves a triumph of dramatic art seldom at- 
tained. It is a scene so delicate it could easily 
have been made either ludicrous or offensive. Had 
not the playwright been able so gradually to 
shape the progress of this scene that the climax 
is attained almost before we are aware, perhaps 
we could not have endured it, and would have 
hissed it off the stage. Had not our feelings of 
curiosity and sympathy been slowly played upon 
by the dramatist, first in introducing the grave 
diggers, by whose witticisms we are kept for 
awhile in good humor ; then by suffering Hamlet 
to appear at the side of the grave, and chaffing 
with the diggers gradually prepare us for the en- 
trance of the dead body of Ophelia, and the sud- 
den discovery by him that the grave is for her, 
and she is mourned by the royal family and even 
by her brother who has returned from the wars ; 
had not all these most interesting scenes preceded 
the extraordinary outburst of passion between 



118 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the rivals of devotion to her rigid body, I say, 
perhaps we could not have endured the unseemly 
effort of two men to prove by their physical 
struggle which is the more in love with her. But 
Shakespeare never fails. The scene, with all its 
delicacy, is so roundly and harmoniously wrought 
to the very climax of perfection, that instead of 
causing us offence, it rather harrows our sympa- 
thetic emotion to an almost unendurable tension. 

It seems to me, therefore, that modern actors 
greatly err, not to say that they violate the text 
of the master, when they refuse to carry out his 
exact stage instructions, in this most maddening 
scene. Unless they can as gradually cultivate 
the interest and ingratiate the sympathy of their 
auditors by their acting, as does the dramatist 
his readers by his words, so that when the time 
comes for leaping into the grave they can do so 
as inoffensively to the audience as the act seems 
to be natural to the readers, then I can but con- 
clude that they have failed in attaining the pur- 
pose of the dramatist and fall short of his ideal. 

The very fact that he instructed Laertes and 
Hamlet to leap into the grave, and that it ap- 
peared to him to be the natural climax of a most 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 119 

fiery and uncontrollable passion, shows that he 
had so wrought up his own emotions in the prepa- 
ration of the play that it seemed to him no other 
justifiable conclusion could be reached, and that 
without that ultra exhibition of insane anger and 
mutual hatred, the audience could not be wrought 
to the highest pitch of interest and sympathy. 
Besides, this very act, of rudely and forgetfully 
leaping into the grave, each to snatch from her 
cold lips the final kiss of farewell, by its very 
primitiveness and aboriginal folly, proves how 
completely both men had lost themselves and been 
swept beyond all presence of mind and thought 
of propriety. Possibly it may also argue some- 
what in favor of the theory of the madness of 
Hamlet; but if so with the authority of the 
author himself. 

But that a scene more somberly pathetic, more 
primitively tragic, more rasping to the heart and 
distracting to the mind could be conceived is dif- 
ficult to believe. Herein are staged, with startling 
effect, the emotions of sorrow, sympathy and re- 
morse. Filial affection points demurely at its 
beautiful victim that lies there in the cold and 
mantling earth; fraternal affection marks its 



120 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

angered and vengeful victim who for the last kiss 
upon the frigid cheek of his dear sister would risk 
his life in a struggle with a supposed madman; 
whilst sexual affection, the hot, erotic passion of 
the heart that only a true and strong man can bear 
for the one he conceives as his faultless ideal, des- 
ignates its victim in the rash and reckless figure 
of one who rushes uninvited on the scene to chal- 
lenge all the hosts of heaven and hell to disap- 
proval of his love. 

And yet we may question whether Hamlet's wild 
profession of devotion to the sweet Ophelia is mere 
acting, the furious outburst of a madman, or the 
purposed and intended taunt to one who is fated 
to become his slayer? It is a problem difficult to 
solve. One thing only we know. After this clam- 
orous profession of his adoration of the fair 
Ophelia ; after he storms out "I loved her ; forty 
thousand brothers could not with all their quality 
of love make up my sum" ; henceforth he is silent 
to the hour of his death on the theme of his agon- 
izing passion. Never again does the name of 
Ophelia escape his lips. She seems to have glided 
wholly out of his memory as stealthily as she first 
wandered into his life. So rapidly congregate the 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 121 

clouds and tempests of passion round his head; 
so sombre, fierce and tragic culminate the climaxes 
of his fate ; that her, who as the beauteous flower 
of the morn now lies trampled and faded in the 
dusty way, he passes by unnoticed. 

Is she then no more to him than the shadow of a 
forgotten dream, the vague recall of a half -re- 
membered song, the dim spectre of an innocent 
love whose lips one time touched his and left the 
impress of a trembling kiss? Is she no more than 
the echo of a purling stream whose music once 
cheered the weary traveller, whose sweet and cool 
waters soothed his fevered tongue? Is she but like 
the gilded morning cloud, whose momentary pres- 
ence gave light and joy to the heart, but whose 
evanishment has taken with it both its glory and 
remembrance ? Or is she like the painful echo of a 
wail whose voice will never silence, whose plaintive 
song will never cease? 

We know not. All we do know is that from 
Hamlet's lips never more escapes a word that re- 
veals to us his thoughts concerning her. But 
may it not be that his love was truly so great 
and oppressive the recall of it was more than 
he could bear; and that, like the stoical and 



122 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

sincere Spinoza, he prefers to make his heart 
the silent tomb which shall forever hold the dead 
body of his dear love, unseen of the world, unap- 
proached by the wanton winds of rumor? Some- 
how we cannot but feel the piercing pathos of his 
insane clamor when he cries to Laertes : 

" Dost thou come here to whine ? 
To outface me with leaping in her grave? 
Be buried quick with her and so will I; 
And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw 
Millions of acres on us, till our ground, 
Singeing his pate against the burning zone, 
Make Ossa like a wart ! " 

O burning, sorrow-flamed and sin-singed soul, 
who can but pity thee! O beautiful, innocent, 
love-enravished Ophelia, better in thy grave, all 
ignorant of thy lover's sad estate ! Love only is 
the revealer of love's secrets. And would one know 
the true nature of Hamlet's most complex and 
mysterious heart one must like Ophelia have 
known what she conceived to be the true depths 
and constancy of his devoted friendship. Yet 
one can but bid her farewell with the tears 
streaming from one's eyes ; for well one knows she 
is not the fabulous figment of a poet's brain, but 



THE FATE OF OPHELIA 123 

the concrete and faultless presentation of millions 
of Eve's daughters, whose woesome lot is ushered 
on the earth with falsely lighted clouds of glory, 
and whose exit is through gloom and melancholy, 
accompanied by the dirge of clamorous remorse, 
mingled with the plaintive notes of pity, that 
haunt the memory like the resounding echoes of 
the never silent sea! 



V 
WAS HAMLET INSANE? 



WAS HAMLET INSANE? 

■" N the investigation of the character of Hamlet 
-*- it must not be forgotten that we are studying 
the genius of Shakespeare. In no respect, per- 
haps, is this matchless genius exemplified more ef- 
fectively than in the analysis of Hamlet's mental 
condition. So perfectly has the master-artist 
wrought in the creation of this character that the 
effort to comprehend it has caused the keenest con- 
tention among the world's most learned critics. 

On the one hand it is assumed that the insanity 
of Hamlet is a mere simulation, which is in no 
sense of the word to be conceived as a real patho- 
logical condition, but is purposely assumed by 
the melancholy Dane to protect himself in his in- 
tended murder of the usurpatious king ; while, on 
the other hand, it is as tenaciously held that the 
insanity is genuine, and so perfectly portrayed 
that it would be impossible for the most accurate 
alienist to present its delineations with greater 
medical exactness or with more complete psycho- 
logical detail. So true is this that lengthy vol- 
umes have been written in defence of both the 
theories, and from the time that the character 
127 



128 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

began to be presented on the stage there have been 
profoundly intelligent actors who have assumed 
the title role from either point of view without 
violence to the text or the spirit of the drama. 

From this fact it is apparent the author has so 
perfectly done his work that whether the charac- 
ter be construed as actually insane or merely simu- 
lating, it is almost impossible to distinguish be- 
tween what should be considered simulation and 
what genuine. First of all then I desire to em- 
phasize the artistic supremacy of the writer and 
impress upon the reader the fact that he must 
have been not only a most thorough going student 
of human nature, but also one of the profoundest 
psychological authorities of his age./ 

It will be my pleasure to show that he not only 
far outstripped his contemporary students and 
philosophers, but that he forged so far along the 
ages as to be almost abreast with our present ad- 
vanced knowledge of scientific psychology. Indeed 
I shall show that no literature extant in his time, 
displayed such intimate and precise acquaintance 
with the curious, not to say mysterious, workings 
of the human mind, as the writings of Shake- 
speare. However, shortly after he himself ended 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 129 

his literary career, there appeared a contempo- 
rary author, who, working out a theory of psy- 
chology from his own deep and sorrowful experi- 
ences, proved first, that Shakespeare's intuitive 
knowledge was absolutely correct, and second, that 
little is known today, in this regard, beyond what 
he himself discovered. 

The remarkable coincidence and mutual corro- 
boration which may be traced between the devel- 
opment of Hamlet's psychological characteristics 
and those that are so minutely described by the 
other author to whom I am referring, would make 
one think, as I shall show a little later, that 
Shakespeare had borrowed his pattern for Ham- 
let's mentality directly from him. Were it not for 
the discrepancy of dates, the other author not 
having published his work for nearly a quarter of 
a century subsequent to the appearance of Ham- 
let, it would be quite difficult to reach any other 
conclusion. But because of this mutual though 
unconscious corroboration by two authors, who 
have traced the nature and effects of melancholy 
along individual but parallel lines, I think we shall 
be able the better to reach a rational conclusion 
concerning the real condition of Hamlet's mind 



130 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

as Shakespeare intended we should apprehend it. 

The work to which I am referring is that known 
as Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," published 
in 1621, whereas according to accepted authority 
Hamlet was first registered in 1602, and printed 
in 1603, slightly over three hundred years ago. 

I shall show that by following the outlines 
traced by this remarkable man, who did but little 
more than develop in his keen analysis his own 
mental condition, we shall be able to reach a fairly 
rational interpretation of the true nature of Ham- 
let's mind. I shall then follow up these conclu- 
sions with some very recent authorities which will, 
I think, even more effectively assist us in reach- 
ing what may be a sound solution of the perplex- 
ing problem. Yet in view of the fact that so 
many minds have differed on this theme it would 
be but the extreme of dogmatism for one to insist 
that he had reached the final interpretation and 
one that scholars must ultimately accept. Doubt- 
less as long as the cultured world reads Hamlet 
and acquaints itself with the ever-surprising de- 
velopments of scientific psychology there will be 
differences of interpretation and warring schools 
extant. 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 131 

I shall first study the plan on which the drama 
was constructed and trace the several arguments 
of importance which have been advanced in advo- 
cacy of the opposite theories relating to his men- 
tal state. At the outset then we must give full 
force to the fact that the plot of the tragedy is 
not at all original with Shakespeare, but has been 
confessedly borrowed, as I have previously stated 
in this course of lectures, from a French drama- 
tist of his day, by the name of Francis de Belle- 
forest. Now in Belleforest's chronicle it is dis- 
tinctly asserted that Hamlet simulated the mental 
state of a madman in order to frustrate the designs 
of the usurping King, and secure himself against 
danger. 

If we are to close the argument here and 
say that because Shakespeare borrowed the 
plot from the Frenchman, or even based it on 
the old English drama, now lost, it must be evident 
that he meant Hamlet only to feign insanity, it 
would be utterly unnecessary to enter deeper into 
the discussion. But the fact obtrudes itself that 
notwithstanding we have the clear authority that 
the original French Hamlet did but simulate mad- 
ness, as unequivocally as did Edgar in Lear, yet 



132 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

when we study the Shakespearean Hamlet we are 
confused in our analysis of it, and our judgment 
is divided between genuine and pretended madness 
in the character. How shall we account for this 
apparent inconsistency? 

The Hamlet of Belief orest was a crude, coarse, 
revengeful, unmeditative, and bloodthirsty mur- 
derer. The Hamlet of Shakespeare is just the 
contrary. He is a highly intellectual, pensive, 
philosophic and melancholic character. The con- 
struction of such a character, therefore, while it 
might be mentally cast after the original or primi- 
tive Hamlet, would work out altogether different 
results in detail. In the latter character if the mad- 
ness is to be a simulation it will undoubtedly be so 
idealized, be woven in such a web of deftness, sub- 
tility and finesse, that it could not be as apparent 
and certain as was the simulation of the crude 
Hamlet of primitive tradition. 

Hence this mere fact in itself, namely that 
Shakespeare borrowed the plot from Belleforest 
with its avowed simulation of insanity, in no de- 
gree assists us in the solution of the enigma of 
the Shakespearean Hamlet, for the reason that in 
the one the simulation would be palpable and be- 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 133 

yond question, while in the other it would be in- 
volved and discovered but with difficulty. Hence 
the first argument usually advanced in favor of 
simulation must be regarded as purely neutral and 
in no wise a factor in the solution for which we 
are striving. 

We are assured, however, by those who are 
convinced of Hamlet's conscious assumption of 
insanity, that he himself positively indicates his 
purpose, in his conversation with Horatio imme- 
diately after the conference with the Ghost. In 
the oath that he causes his friends to take on the 
hilt of his sword wherein he says, "So help you 
mercy, how strange or odd so e'er I bear myself, 
as I perchance hereafter shall think meet to put 
an antic disposition on," it is contended he clearly 
intimates his purpose of assuming some exterior 
appearance that may be akin to madness. Doubt- 
less at this moment some such resolution had 
vaguely shaped itself in his mind. Indeed we dis- 
cern an immediate intimation of what "antic dis- 
position" he might put on in the quaint and puz- 
zling reception he gives to Horatio after they 
meet on the final exit of the spirit. 

Horatio hastens to him all solicitous of the na- 



134 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ture of the interview and with undisguised antici- 
pation of some startling revelation. Hamlet had 
privately spoken to the Ghost, had enjoyed the 
extraordinary privilege of conversing with one 
who had "returned from the bourn of that undis- 
covered country," and what wonders would he not 
divulge to his excited friend who now rushes 
toward him with eager expectation! 

Then Hamlet puts on an "antic disposition." 
To Horatio's nervous questioning he replies with 
vexatious gaiety and abandon, as if he were to 
reveal something marvellous. "There's ne'er a 
villain dwelling in all Denmark, but he's an arrant 
knave." This he speedily follows with more wan- 
ton bantering of a similar character, till Horatio 
replies in despair, "These are but wild and whirl- 
ing words, my lord." Now, in so much as Hamlet 
afterwards, in private, reveals the real nature of 
the Ghost's narrative to Horatio, we may justly 
assume that he refused to do so on this occasion 
because of the presence of Bernardo and Marcel- 
lus, whom he apparently did not feel disposed to 
trust as implicitly as he did Horatio. Therefore 
he begins to assume his "antic disposition" of dis- 
guise and seeming indifference; which is very 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 135 

much like the disposition he puts on afterwards 
toward Polonius throughout the play until he un- 
intentionally slays him. 

It seems to me, therefore, all we can justly or 
logically deduce from this famous remark of 
Hamlet is that the first effect on him of his con- 
ference with the Ghost was the deep conviction 
that he must keep the solemn revelation he had 
heard from those lips of the dead forever sealed in 
the secrecy of his own soul, till such time as he had 
consummated the act of final vengeance on which 
the spirit had commissioned him. / 

We shall see further on that whenever he is con- 
scious of his air of assumed indifference he puts 
on this same "antic disposition" of forced gai- 
ety and wanton sarcasm ; but when he loses him- 
self absolutely in the fury of a consuming pas- 
sion he knows nothing of such a disposition, but 
reveals the deep flame of madness that burns 
within his vitals. I will say, at this juncture, that 
we must carefully distinguish between these two 
opposing moods — the one of pretended gaiety 
and forced indifference, and the other of profound 
melancholy and "towering passion" — if we would 
discover the real key to his character and discern 
the true nature of his malady. 



136 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

That this point may be made more emphatic let 
us review several of the scenes wherein these two 
opposite dispositions of Hamlet are clearly dis- 
closed. In his various conversations with Polo- 
nius, with Guilderstern and Rosencrantz, when in 
the presence of witnesses, and even partially with 
Ophelia (save where he momentarily yields to the 
genuine love he feels for her), it is very apparent 
he plays a part — puts on an antic disposition. It 
would be most absurd and untenable, as I shall 
soon show, to assume that Hamlet had reached the 
stage of complete dementia, in the course of his 
malady. In that stage of mental disease the pa- 
tient loses all coherency of speech and logical re- 
lation of words. 

But Shakespeare never permits his Hamlet 
to reach that stage of dementia, save in the 
speeches wherein he clearly reveals the fact 
that he is but playing. As where he says to 
Polonius, who questions him, "Yes, you are a fish- 
monger," and then proceeds most unmercifully 
to banter him. Wh ere he makes the "tedious old 
fool" see a whale, a camel and a weasel almost 
simultaneously in the same cloud. In all these 
conversations with Polonius he puts on the air of 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 137 

complete madness, and is undoubtedly conscious 
that he is deceiving the old premier, and enjoys 
the sport with the keenest relish. 

Likewise in his conversations with Guilderstern 
and Rosencrantz he plays the same daring role, ut- 
terly confusing them, especially after his slaugh- 
ter of Polonius. And in particular do we note 
this fact in his conversation with the King after 
the King calls him to court to answer for the body 
of the slain minister of state. In these situations 
we see quite clearly how Hamlet would devise it 
as a safe and most deluding performance on his 
part to play the act of the confirmed madman, 
saying to himself with conclusive logic, "Now is 
the time for me to play the part in fact. If the 
King believes me to be really mad he will not dare 
to punish me for the deed, but will seek in some 
way to excuse my crime." 

Hamlet being, really mad might hope for the 
King's leniency. But if he had slain Polonius in 
cold blood and in full possession of his faculties, 
the King would have a just cause against him and 
might order him to the executioner. Hence Ham- 
let's only hope of escape is the deepening of the 
plot of madness, with which madness the entire 



138 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

court had already charged him. That this was 
the state of Hamlet's mind we may see faintly in- 
dicated in the greedy delight with which he ac- 
cepts the King's proposal that he go at once to 
England./ 

Now, these are all the scenes, excepting those 
with Ophelia, in which the pretended madness of 
Hamlet is made manifest by the dramatist, and in 
which it seems to me the simulation of the malady 
is palpable and beyond dispute. If the theory of 
the playwright were to be judged from these 
scenes only, then I think it would be most conclu- 
sively decided that it was that of pretended or as- 
sumed madness and not at all pathological or 
genuine insanity. 

But if this be so then again we must meet the 
puzzling question, "Why are the critics so di- 
vided; why do they not all at once conclude that 
the theory of simulation is correct and the only 
logical theory the tragedy discloses?" Of course 
the reply is that in other scenes of the play the 
hero displays other mental dispositions, other col- 
orings of his state of mind, which we cannot 
justly classify with mere simulation, but which 
take on most serious phases of genuine madness 
or some kindred psychological affection. 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 139 

We must examine first the scenes with Ophelia, 
which are, perhaps, the most puzzling of all. 
Toward Ophelia whom he seemed at one time, as 
indeed he demurely confesses, to have loved most 
tenderly and devoutly, he displays a confusion 
of emotions, which at first seem to reveal the symp- 
toms of genuine insanity and anon to be most 
palpable simulation. When he first appears to her 
after the maddening conference with the Ghost, 
she herself vividly describes his deplorable and 
dilapidated condition. He comes staring like a 
madman. His clothes are all awry, his hair 
disheveled, his stockings down gyved to his ankles, 
and his actions are wild, incoherent and mean- 
ingless. 

From her description it is quite apparent that 
Hamlet intended to ape the appearance of one 
crazed, and to frighten her so that she would fear 
thereafter to receive any further attention from 
him ; so that he might kill her love completely, see- 
ing that he could never now requite it after what 
the Ghost had told him. He plays the part most 
successfully, absolutely frightening her "out of 
her wits," and causing her to flee in horror to her 
unsympathetic father. But when again he meets 



140 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

her after a period of separation, he is in a most 
unhappy state of mind. His native self, sincerely 
sad and most inconsolably downcast, has again 
possessed him. More seriously than ever the 
thought of suicide is contemplated. He is in pro- 
found meditation on the theme "To be or not to 
be," when suddenly he espies her. His first 
prompting is that of love : "Nymph in thy orisons 
be all my sins remembered" sorrowfully he ex- 
claims. 

Now in the spirited and mournful conversation 
that ensues it will be noticed that the two dispo- 
sitions of Hamlet: the assumed "antic disposi- 
tion," and the other one of natural "weakness and 
melancholy," are constantly playing for the mas- 
tery. At one time he is tender, kindly, pathetic 
and imploring. At another, he is full of anger, 
reprimand, irony and accusation. The latter 
feelings are palpably forced and simulated. He 
does not believe in his own criminations. He pities 
her because she is compelled to listen to his wild 
and unwarranted ravings. He knows that he is 
doing her gross injustice and he would if he 
dared, clutch her in his arms and bury her in his 
kisses and embraces. 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 141 

Therefore we hear him pleading at first kindly 
and hopefully that she might ensconce herself in 
a nunnery where she would know nothing of his 
revengeful purposes against the King and of the 
final murder he contemplates. But when at length 
he discovers "the lawful espials," the King and 
Polonius concealed, anger, horror and exaspera- 
tion strive for the conquest of his spirit, and with 
them suspicion of her whom he so much loves; 
together, all creating in his breast a tempest of 
passion and unmastered fury, which makes the 
King himself, and even Polonius, believe that it 
is more than the malady of love that possesses and 
has distempered him. In my judgment it is in 
this scene with Ophelia that the dramatist first re- 
veals the rapidly developing stage of Hamlet's 
mental deterioration. 

If the furious outburst of melancholic raving 
that Hamlet evinces in this scene had been its only 
and final exposition we might still be forced to 
conclude that it was mere pretension and splen- 
did acting. Although we might regard it the 
extreme of cruelty, so to ignore and smite the 
delicate nature of his devoted sweetheart, still we 
would not be justified in concluding that his per- 



142 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

formance was more than such emphatic simula- 
tion as he felt it necessary to assume under the 
circumstances to convince the concealed "espials" 
of. his actual madness. 

( But this is not the only scene in which this pas- 
sionate outburst is exhibited. Indeed in this 
scene we have its meagerest and least convincing 
manifestation. We witness it again and again in 
situations most appalling and horrifying, and in 
such manner as to assure us that it is really genu- 
ine and not assumed. We witness this exposition 
of his true psychological state in all his solilo- 
quies, when alone, and with no thought of dis- 
closing his heart to others; we witness it in the 
closet scene with his mother, when the supreme 
bete noire of his being — his uncle — is the topic of 
conversation ; we witness it in the chapel scene 
when he is prompted to fall on the praying King 
and run him through ; and we witness it finally and 
in a most flagrant manner in the grave scene 
where he quarrels and wrestles with Laertes, abso- 
lutely losing himself in the tempest of a "tower- 
ing passion," which compels the queen to declare 
him really mad, and to confound even Horatio, 
his only bosom friend, the confidant of all his 
secrets. 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 143 

( I have therefore reached the conclusion that 
there is but one key that will unlock the mystery 
of the malady of Hamlet. That key is the con- 
sciousness of the existence or presence of his uncle 
the King. This fact, coupled with his native mel- 
ancholy, which is of the deepest dye, I believe will 
help us fully to solve all the difficulties of the 
problem and diagnose the actual psychological 
disease that masters him. In order to appreciate 
this solution we must carefully follow the growth 
of the malady from the first appearance of Ham- 
let in the play to the closing scene. As we have 
before noted in these lectures the reigning King 
himself declares that it was the sudden death of 
his father that caused the complete transforma- 
tion of Hamlet's mental state and brought on the 
condition of extreme melancholy and dejection. 
We know therefore that this disposition was not 
congenital with him, but was brought on by an 
artificial cause. What was that cause? The sud- 
den taking off of the King his father. 

Hamlet therefore first appears to us in the play 
in a most solemn state of mind, rebuking his 
mother for insinuating that his "nighted color" 
was the symbol only of apparent grief. "Seems, 



144 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

madam, nay it is. I know not seems," he groans : 
"I have that within that passeth show." It is .then 
all too apparent that Hamlet is already buried in 
the profoundest depths of gloom before the open- 
ing of the play. As yet he does not know the 
actual cause of his father's taking off, but is 
struggling with the two maddening emotions of 
grief and shame. This state of mind is revealed 
in the long, pathetic soliliquy in the first act just 
before Horatio has come to tell him of his 
father's reappearance. Shakespeare seems to 
have poured out his own soul in the sad mono- 
logue, "O that this too, too solid flesh would 
melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew." His 
own sad disappointment in love at this time, 
his witnessing the pure flower of his devotions 
sullied by the base embraces of a low-minded 
traitor, were sufficient to inspire him with un- 
equalled eloquence, put on the lips of one who 
saw the ideal of womanhood besmirched in the per- 
son of his own beloved and honored mother. Here 
is genuine, unpretended, heart-devouring sorrow. 
Here is melancholy already but one step from the 
"cliff that beetles o'er the base into the sea." It 
is no antic disposition when to himself he moans : 



CHA1U.KS ni 1.1 ON VS 11 UI1 FT 



How now ! ;\ rat .-' 

Dead, for a ducat, dead. W i 111. Sc. IV. 



CHARLES FECHTER AS HAMLET 



Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know- 
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your 
gambols? your songs? Act V, Sc. I. 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 151 

in his right mind, rave at Laertes because he was 
grieving over the death of his sister ? Why should 
he boast of his love against a brother's natural 
and most worthy love? Why should Laertes rouse 
his angry passion, against whom he had no griev- 
ance in the world, but on the contrary toward 
whom he must have entertained the tenderest feel- 
ings because of being the brother of his unhappy 
sweetheart ?/ 

The sincerity of Hamlet's ebullition of anger 
cannot only not be questioned in this scene, but 
little less can we doubt that it, for the mo- 
ment, wholly demented his mind. This is evi- 
denced in the astonishing burst of pathetic re- 
buke to Laertes, who had done absolutely nothing 
to offend him, yet who Hamlet feels has most 
grossly and wilfully outraged his affections. 
After his furious outburst of anger he turns to 
Laertes and pitifully cries: — 

" Hear you sir, 
What is the reason that you have used me thus? 
I loved you ever. But 'tis no matter 
Let Hercules himself do what he may, 
The cat will mew and dog will have his day ! " 

This sudden diversion from extreme anger to 



152 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

rebuking pathos, and instant suspicion of the mo- 
tive of one whose unwitting actions stirred his 
spleen, is as emphatic and characteristic an action 
of a madman as can well be conceived. If this be 
simulation, it is so perfect, the most skilled and 
experienced alienist could not possibly detect it. 

He seems to be confused in his own mind as to 
what the real cause of his outburst was. He says 
to Horatio that it was the display of Laertes* 
"bravery of grief" that drove him into "a tower- 
ing passion." But to Laertes himself he makes 
most humble apology when again they meet, and 
attributes his outburst of unwarrantable anger to 
his "madness," which "punishes him with sore 
distraction." 

I do not think it is just to accuse Hamlet here 
of inconsistency or falsehood, trying to ingrati- 
ate himself in the continued confidence of Horatio 
by confessing to him it was the boast of Laertes 
that maddened him, and to regain the friendship 
of Laertes by assuring him he is afflicted with 
madness and at times knows not what he does. I 
think Hamlet by this time knew perfectly well that 
both of these self -accusations were truthful. That 
indeed he was possessed of a certain madness 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 157 

sessed of the "weakness" of an almost uncontrolla- 
ble temper, the exhibition of which we so often 
witness throughout the drama; if again we shall 
not forget that he is ever suspicious of all with 
whom he comes in contact, trusting but only one 
person in all the world; then again if we remem- 
ber that he has been singularly marked, by a de- 
cree apparently from heaven, as a man commis- 
sioned to perform a deed from which his every 
nature instinctively revolts ; we shall see not only 
motive sufficient, but enough of native tissue and 
timber woven in the fabric of a mental malady, 
as utterly betimes to drive reason from his throne 
and make of the victim a raving madman. 

The fact that Hamlet has not reached the fixed 
stage of frenzy, or permanent madness, is doubt- 
less what has confused many. 'But they seem to 
forget that the monomaniac is perfectly sane on 
all subjects save one; and that he never rages or 
loses his wits save when contemplating that 
touchstone of his temper. 

Now that we have reviewed the several scenes 
wherein it seems to me the writer makes clear the 
diverse and conflicting characteristics of his hero, 
I shall here present an extract from the famous 



158 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

contemporary of Shakespeare to whom I referred 
in the early part of this lecture, and note how 
well it describes the various stages of Hamlet's 
malady. In his "Anatomy of Melancholy," 
Burton says of this distemper, "Suspicion and 
jealousy are general symptoms. If two walk to- 
gether, discourse, whisper, jest, he thinks pres- 
ently they mean him, or if they talk with him, he 
is ready to misconstrue every word they speak and 
interpret it to the worst. Inconstant, they are, in 
all their actions ; vertiginous, restless, unapt to re- 
solve on any business ; they will, and they will not ; 
persuaded to and from upon every occasion ; yet, 
if once resolved, obstinate and hard to be recon- 
ciled. They do, and by and by repent them of 
what they have done; so that both ways they are 
disquieted, of all hands, soon weary. They are of 
profound judgment in some things, excellent ap- 
prehensions, judicious, wise, witty; for melan- 
choly advances men's conceits more than any hu- 
mour whatever. Fearful, suspicious of all, yet 
again, many of them, desperate hair-brains ; rash, 
careless, fit to be assassinates, as being void of all 
truth and sorrow. Tedium vitae (weariness of life) 
is a common symptom ; they soon are tired with all 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 159 

things ; — often tempted to make away with them- 
selves ; they cannot die, they will not live ; they 
complain, lament, >veep, and think they lead a 
most melancholy life." 

Were one asked to give an analysis of Ham- 
let's career, as depicted by Shakespeare, one 
could not devise a better description than what is 
here presented by Burton. Indeed, did we not 
know, we would be inclined to think that Shake- 
speare, who was a great copyist, might have taken 
this description for a pattern and built around it 
the perplexing characteristics of his hero. But the 
curious fact remains that these two authors writ- 
ing, though in fashion so differently, on the same 
theme, reach conclusions so much alike that they 
seem to be almost copies of each other. Now 
couple with this fact that Burton was but de- 
scribing his own malady, and not an imaginary 
one, and you see how accurate and truthful it 
must be. 

Suppose, then, on such a character as Burton 
here describes, there had been imposed the hor- 
rible commission of regicide, so utterly revolting 
to his refined nature, can we not well see that it 
would develop all the symytoms of melancholic 



160 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

madness, or monomania, precisely as they are set 
forth in the career of Hamlet? Therefore the 
only conclusion I can reach, which seems to me ra- 
tional and in accord with scientific knowledge of 
the human mind, is that Hamlet was a victim of 
melancholic monomania, throwing him into states 
of temporary frenzy or utter madness, from 
which he speedily recovers. As says his mother 
at the grave of Ophelia: 

" This is mere madness; 
And thus awhile the fit will work on him; 
Anon, as patient as the female dove, 
When that her golden couplets are disclosed, 
His silence will sit drooping." 

There is one further theory I desire briefly to 
advance in elucidation of Hamlet's singular men- 
tal condition, which has been but recently brought 
forth through psychological experimentation. 
There is a state that sometimes possesses people, 
which is called "automatic emotionalism;" under 
the influence of which they permit themselves to 
do most repulsive things, even while conscious of 
the absurdity or atrociousness of it, and yet seem 
to be incapable of resisting the temptation. Says 
one author (Boris Sidis, a recognized authority 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 161 

on Psychology) "The patient is fully aware of 
the absurdity of the idea, but still that idea con- 
tinues to rise from the depths of his mind and 
insert itself into his mental operations." Again 
he says, describing a similar state of mind "In 
impulsive insanity we meet with a similar mental 
condition. A seemingly unaccountable impulse 
seizes on the mind of the patient, an impulse which 
is sometimes so overwhelming that restraint is 
simply unthinkable." (My readers will kindly 
note that this looks very much like a description 
of Hamlet's state of mind at Ophelia's grave 
when he leaps on Laertes). "No sooner," says 
our author, "does the impulse come into conscious- 
ness than it works itself out with fatal necessity. 
It is a kind of emotional automatism." Again he 
says "Pyromania, or the impulse to incendiarism, 
kleptomania, or the impulse to steal, homocidal or 
suicidal impulses — all of them belong to that pe- 
culiar form of mental alienation that may be char- 
acterised as impulsive insanity." 

In my judgment this scientific description is 
a perfect analysis of Hamlet's true mental condi- 
tion. If we couple with this description the fact 
that Hamlet saw hallucinations, a very common 



162 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

symptom of this disease, and that under the in- 
fluence of such hallucination he had been ordered 
to commit a most appalling deed, as well as to 
have been fired to the very deeps of Ins being by 
the revelation of his father's murder, we may 
well understand how so melancholy a person as he 
would have become constantly subject to the 
workings of what this author calls either emo- 
tional automatism or impulsive insanity. 

To me I confess it is a soothing consolation to 
accept such an analysis of Hamlet's mind, for 
without it I could not hoist him to the high niche 
in Fame's honorable temple where tradition fain 
has set him. We would think of him as noble, 
tender, lofty-minded and soulfully aspiring to the 
purest ideals. Even in an age of coarse morals 
and intellectual deformity, we have been wont to 
see in him the very paragon of honor and climax 
of magnanimity. None, who has read Ophelia's 
sweet and pathetic description of him, (the por- 
trait he had painted of himself on her memory by 
his splendid deeds of virtue and integrity before 
the affliction of his father's death and mother's 
shameful marriage had distorted his mind), can 



WAS HAMLET INSANE 163 

but believe that he was indeed "the glass of fash- 
ion and the mould of form." 

How then shall we account for such a sudden 
transformation of so noble a character into a cruel 
persecutor and bloodthirsty murderer, without 
conceiving that in the cracking of that heart there 
also came a rift in the lute of his noble mind? In 
all ages we have pitied those whose minds are weak 
or turned awry, and forgiven them their most 
shocking and abandoned deeds. Even so miser- 
able a miscreant as Claudius, the murderous 
uncle and usurpatious King, recognizes this un- 
written law of humanity, and believing Hamlet 
mad seeks not to call down judgment on him for 
his slaughter of Polonius. 

Thus, then, let him rest in our memories. In in- 
tellect, untouched by the palsy of disease, his 
mind can think and reason with the best ; but in 
will, sore and afflicted, because of the most griev- 
ous torture that can agonize a human soul. He is, 
when swept into the tempest of his passion, — 
while awhirl in the maelstrom of his malady, — 
irresponsible for his deeds, whose foulest must be 
overlooked by us with what charity we bestow 
upon a madman; yet in whom, when restored, we 



164 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

discern again the brow of honor and the visage 
of integrity ! We shall say, mingling our tears 
with Ophelia's, as we behold him now dead and 
seated on the throne of which he was in life de- 
prived, and hear Horatio pray that "flights of 
angels may sing him to rest," what the poor girl 
said when overwhelmed with the belief of the utter 
dethronement of his lofty intellect : 

" O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown ; 
Now see we that sovereign and most noble reason, 
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune, and harsh; 
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth 
Blasted with ecstacy ! " 



VI 



ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF 
THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET. 



ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF 
THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 

TO read into an author's words a meaning 
which perchance he may not have meant to 
convey is an easy slip of the reviewer's pen. It 
is always difficult to know precisely what an 
author may have intended, what may have been 
his deeper and more recondite meanings, espe- 
cially when his thoughts are presented not in 
argumentation and discursive speech, but in the 
embodiment of symbolism, allegory or character 
impersonation. The mind must first discern some 
clear idea of the author's half revealed or deep 
concealed thought before the reader can justly in- 
terpret his works. Our opinion, favorable or oth- 
erwise, will rest wholly upon the personal inter- 
pretation we make of the production we are perus- 
ing. Oft times because we lose sight of the 
author's point of view and read into his creation 
our own less abstruse conception, devoid of his 
finesse and casuistry, we find incongruities, the 
absence of logic and a want of interest. 

Many of Shakespeare's plays have thus been 
criticized by those who seemed incapable of rising 
167 



168 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

to his mental or philosophical plane, who have not 
hesitated to denounce him as a literary pretender 
and a very wretched interpreter of human nature. 
His most bitter critics have been those who had 
thought the stage should portray to the fascinated 
listener only such scenes and characters as would 
be regarded as true exemplars to the discerning, 
and noble inspirations to the aspiring. A play for 
them must be a consistent production, revealing 
but one phase of life unmingled with incongrui- 
ties or contradictions. It must be all tragedy or 
all comedy ; all laughter or all tears. 

To such critics the mingling of the sunshine 
with the glowing cloud — the redeeming glint of 
the silver lining — was disruptive of reason and 
subjective experience. The mind, they think, can 
grasp but one thought, or one phase of thought, 
at a single time. When men laugh they are so 
engaged in their frivolity or delight that they can 
but poorly contemplate the possibility of despond- 
ency or wretchedness. Hence to such critics there 
is not only inconsistency but something akin to 
savagery in the interplay between tragedy and 
comedy in the same performance. It appalls them 
as would the sudden outburst of laughter at a 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 169 

funeral, or the shout of sensible delight at the 
lowering of the coffin into the grave. To such 
critics every tragedy of Shakespeare is an ano- 
maly, nay, an atrocity, contrary to natural ex- 
perience and subversive of the higher ideals of the 
race. 

It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that among a 
people so simple, unaffected and amenable to 
natural impulse, as were the ancient Greeks, their 
moods of melancholy should be so discrete, so 
separate from their moments of mental exaltation 
and spiritual abandonment, that the two were 
never presented together in their dramatic plays, 
but were regarded as contradictory and mutually 
conflicting. For centuries this idea prevailed in 
literature, even till the time of Shakespeare, whose 
daring originality so amazed and angered his 
critics that they wholly lost sight of his sublime 
point of view. 

But as I shall contend in a subsequent lec- 
ture, Shakespeare is distinctly a portrait painter, 
a delineator of life and character. When, 
therefore, he found tears and smiles intermingled 
in the course of human events — that in short men 
were not always only happy nor always only sad, 



170 THE TK.UUUn OF HAMLET 



but that over the currents, though flowing in op- 
posite courses, often met and intermingled, he bo 
presented them in his descriptive plays. Ilow- 
ever, unless this point of view were discerned by 
the student he would experience a constant shock 
to Ins finer or at Least conventional feelings, and 
would be able to conjure but little sympathy in 
his soul with Shakespeare's immortal creations. 

A groat philosopher, tor instance, who wrote 
about 160 years after the play of Hamlet was 
written, Voltaire, thus speaks disparagingly of 
Shakespeare's unparalleled masterpiece. "Far be 
it from me to justify everything that is in that 
drama (Hamlet"). It is a Vulgar ami barbarous 
drama that would not be tolerated by the vilest 
populace of Franco or Italy. Hamlet becomes 
crazy in the first act, and his mistress in the third; 
the prince slays the father of his mistress under 
the pretense of killing a rat, and the heroine 
throws herself into a river : a grave IS dug upon 
the stage, and the grave diggers talk quodlibets 
worthy of themselves, while holding skulls in their 
hands. Hamlet responds to their nasty vulgari- 
ties in silliness no less disgusting. Hamlet, his 
mother and father-in-law carouse on the stage; 



THE CHARACTERS IS HAMLET 171 

songs are ,uu^ ; here i. quarrelling, fighting, kill- 
ing, on<- would imagine thif piece to be the work 
of a drunken lavage. But amidst all those vul- 
gar irregularities, which to this daj make the 

English drama so absurd and so barbarous, there 
arc to be found in Hamlet some sublime passages 
worthy of the greatest genius. Jt. seem •-. as 
though nature had mingled in the brain of Shal 
peare the greatest conceivable strength and gran- 
deur wJi.Ij whatsoever witless vulgarity can devi <■ 
as lowest and most detestable." 

We are glad to know that Voltaire's opinion of 
Shakespeare i-> not the national opinion oi the 
French people. Since his day many of the chief 
French critics and litterateuri have praised him 
without stint. Evidently, however, Voltaire failed 
to appreciate the fulness and comprehensiveness 
of Shakespeare's genius, because he was unable to 
arrive at the same point of view. Voltaire's con- 
ception of the drama bring that nothing should 
be presented on the stage but what is wholesome 

and uplifting: that such blotches as are actually 
found in human characters should in literature 

and the drama be wholly suppressed in order that 

the mind might be allured by some fantastic II- 



172 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

lusionment; he was naturally shocked when he 
read in Shakespeare the appalling and gross dis- 
play of baseness, depravity and flagrant immor- 
ality. But Voltaire failed to see, as I shall here- 
after show, that Shakespeare is neither a preacher 
nor a protagonist of morality; that he is, even 
as nature herself, merely unmoral, presenting life 
and character as they actually exist, and suffering 
their exhibitions to affect humankind as they may. 

Therefore in Shakespeare's tragedies all phases 
of life and experience are presented; alike the 
tears and the laughter; the joy and the sorrow; 
the hope and despair ; the purity of noble affection 
and the detestableness of vulgar lust and besotted 
passion. He so balances and arranges them that 
they affect the understanding in an ensemble of 
grandeur and sublimity which, despite the enor- 
mity of the crime displayed, awakens in the 
reader an ambition to ascend to loftier heights of 
moral attainment. 

We shall find this especially true of the great 
tragedy we are in particular contemplating. 
Into the tragedy of Hamlet, Shakespeare not only 
throws all the splendor of his abandoned and pro- 
lific genius ; he likewise throws himself — his life, 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 173 

his experiences, his deep sorrows, his passionate 
pain, his maddening despondency, his tragic con- 
templation of suicide and self-destruction. For 
indeed until we well understand the man, Shakes- 
peare, we are ill prepared to appreciate the char- 
acter of Hamlet. When he wrote this play he had 
not only attained the maximum development of 
his genius but also mature and most saddening ex- 
periences. For it seems to be a very truth that 
Shakespeare meant to portray himself, his own 
life, in the melancholy and oppressive story of the 
distinguished Danish prince.* None would be able 
to discern Shakespeare in his dramatic creations ; 
but elsewhere he affords us glimpses into his inner 
life, that enable us with such knowledge to de- 
cipher him somewhat in the productions of his 
brain. In his sonnets more especially he reveals 
himself to us. As when he sings : 

*" Just such a crisis, bringing with it the 'loss of all his mirth, ' 
Shakespeare himself recently had undergone. He had lost 
in the previous year the protectors of his youth. The woman 
he had loved, and to whom he had looked up to as to a being 
of a rarer, loftier order, had all of a sudden proved to be a 
heartless, faithless wanton. The friend he loved, worshipped 
and adored, had conspired against him with this woman, 
laughed at him in her arms, betrayed his confidence, and 
treated him with coldness and distance. Even the prospect 
of winning the poet's wreath had been overcast for him. 
Truly he had seen his illusion vanish and his vision of the 
world fall to ruins." — George Brandes. 



174 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



" When in disgrace with fortune's and men's eyes 
I all alone beweep my outcast state, 
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, 
And look upon myself and curse my fate ; " 

we discern an intimation of some profound woe 
which has embittered his soul and given to his 
mind the melancholic complexion that cast its pale 
hue over that of Hamlet. But at the same time 
he was instinctively so jubilant and hilarious, his 
spirits were always so buoyant and elastic, that 
such moods must have been but temporary. Nev- 
ertheless they left their deep impress on his soul, 
and when he created his great characters, uncon- 
sciously these deeper and buried emotions of past 
experience rose to the surface and imbedded them- 
selves into the structures he was erecting. 

Thus do we see in "Hamlet" almost the whole of 
life; its gaiety, carousing and abandonment; its 
solemnity and serious contemplation of checkered 
possibilities in this world and "that undiscovered 
bourn from which no traveler returns;" the 
beauty and bewildering joy of innocent love and 
the maddening horror of unrequited affection ; the 
indescribable shock occasioned by the discovery of 
a secret murder, and the "deep damnation" of a 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 175 



cold, unprovoked and premeditated fratricide ; 
the dismay and feverish distraction which darkens 
the soul when the thought o'ertakes it that pos- 
sibly the spirits of departed tenants of the flesh 
may revisit the earth "in the witching time of 
night when church yards yawn;" the heroism of 
a noble brother vainly fighting for the honor and 
reclamation of his outraged suicide-sister; the 
meandering and verbose philosophy of garrulous 
age, which has outlived its usefulness but not its 
wit; the shameless defilement of a once noble 
queen, whose sins cry rank to heaven and so offend 
the white soul of her princely son she cannot with- 
stand his rebuke that "speaks daggers but uses 
none;" and the final culmination, wherein is seen 
the fruitage of crime in swift retaliation — the 
general death of all who fall beneath its blight — 
and the sad overthrow and wreckage of that gentle 
frame in which so long has been tenanted the 
white soul of one who ever refused "with candied 
tongue to lick absurd pomp," or to "crook the 
pregnant hinges of the knee" in abject fawning 
to sceptred wrong, or earthly infamy crowned 
with divine authority. 

With this thought in mind, then, to me the en- 



176 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

tire play presents a somewhat different phase than 
as it has appeared to the conventional critic. It 
seems to me the play is a species of symbolism or 
allegory, and that through these semi-historic 
semblances Shakespeare reveals to us the princi- 
ples of his recondite philosophy and his general 
interpretation of human life. When we investigate 
the original sources from which the playwright 
secured his plot and then observe what a halo of 
idealism he has cast over all the characters he 
found in historic chronicles, we may easily discern 
that he had no thought of merely representing in 
dramatic form a highly interesting though maud- 
lin and pessimistic incident of Danish history; 
but that he uses these events as a worthy frame- 
work around which to erect his resplendent struc- 
ture of philosophic wisdom and allegorical in- 
nuendo. 

I do not wish to convey the idea that the play 
of "Hamlet" is an allegory in the usual form or 
that its characters are allegorical in the sense of 
being mythical or endued with miraculous quali- 
ties. But I mean that notwithstanding the sem- 
blant historical accuracy with which the chief 
characters are drawn by the master hand, never- 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 177 

theless the use which is made of each character, 
(namely) to read into it a specific interpretation 
of life, is in its nature allegorical and phantastic. 

That I may make my meaning clear and that 
we may be able to discern the deeper thought 
which it seems to me Shakespeare attempted to 
reveal in the distinguished characters of the play, 
I shall devote this essay to describing them and 
the allegorical conception which I believe they in- 
volve. I am aware that it may appear rather bold 
to attempt this ; for I am not sure that any other 
critic has ever taken this view; and that my in- 
terpretation may therefore be frowned down as 
chimerical and absurd. Nevertheless I shall pre- 
sent it for the consideration of the reader ; and if 
acceptable, Shakespeare's reputation will not be 
the worse, whereas if rejected, I need but suffer a 
momentary humiliation. 

First, then, our study shall be the King of 
Denmark, reigning when the play begins. Be- 
fore the opening of the play this king has slain 
his brother, and thus secured the throne. The 
murder was secret and so performed that discov- 
ery seemed impossible. He had poured poison 
into the victim's ears, while asleep. He has not 



178 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

only secured the throne by this foul murder but 
also the Queen, his brother's spouse, who is the 
mother of Prince Hamlet. The reigning King is 
presented as a man of strong will, perverse nature, 
and assuming an air of condescending kindness 
toward the outraged and melancholy son. 

He thus addresses him to allay his heart's sor- 
row for his father's taking off: 

" 'T is sweet and commendable in your nature, 
Hamlet, 
To give these mourning duties to your father; 
That father lost, lost his; and the survivor bound 
In filial obligation for some term 
To do obsequious sorrow; but to persevere 
In obstinate condolement is a course 
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief; 
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, 
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, 
An understanding simple and mischool'd: 
For what we know must be and is as common 
As any the most vulgar thing to sense, 
"Why should we in our peevish opposition 
Take it to heart? '* 

Thus feeling his way, as if oblivious of his 
mortal crime, he seeks to allay his own inward 
feelings of fear and solicitude for his deed, as 



TJIK CHARACTERS IX HAMLET 179 



much as to calm the tumultuous bosom of* hii 
adopted son. In this first, appearance of flic king- 
he looms upon us as the bold embodiment of the 

hypocritical criminal. He knows well the un- 
speakable deed he hai performed. Deep in the se- 
cret of his lie-art lie must Lave said to himself a 
thousand times that which he exclaimed when, in a 
later scene he is about to kneel in prayer- -like a 

tortured hypocrite snivelling at the remembrance 

of his unpardonable guilt — 

" O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; 

It hath the primal eldest corse upon it, 

A brother's murder! Pray can f /jot ; 

" Though inclination be as sharp as will .... 

wretched state.! O bosom black as death! 

O limed soul that straggling to be free 

Art more engaged! Help angels! Make assay! 

Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of 

steel 
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!" 

And yet despite this inward sense of conscious 
gtlilt he carries ever a forward front, tenacious 
of authority, and a most brazen demeanor. Strong 
in his belief that his deed can never be discovered, 
that his son is melancholy only because of the 



180 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

natural sorrow at his father's taking off, and but 
little conceiving that Hamlet has the most remote 
apprehension of his, the King's personal crime, 
he bears himself with ostentatious calm and forced 
indifference. Even when apparent danger con- 
fronts him, and Laertes returns from France to 
hear of the death of his father, whom he thinks 
the King has slain, and, breaking in the doors of 
the palace with an armed band, confronts him with 
the implied charge of his guilt, the King with 
magnificent composure waives him off, and gently 
rebukes the Queen for her solicitude for his 
safety : 

" Let him go, Gertrude ; do not fear our person ; 
There's such divinity doth hedge a king, 
That treason can but peep to what it would." 

And even when Laertes, carried away by a wild 
passion of mingled grief and vengeance cries 
back: 

" To hell allegiance ! vows to the blackest devil ! 
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit! 
I dare damnation ! " 

the King, with the oily unction of a practiced 
hypocritic priest not only allays his spirit, but 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 181 

wins him to his own uses and makes him an instru- 
ment by which to destroy the disquieted son of 
the murdered King, whom he has now learned to 
fear. 

Thus to the very end of the play, till the mo- 
ment that the rapier of the dying Hamlet is 
thrust unsuspectedly in his bosom, does this per- 
sonage carry himself with the majestic sway of 
the pompous hypocrite, determined to triumph 
despite the opposition of earth or heaven, or all 
the mustering hosts of blackest hell. Shakespeare 
gives to him much prominence, oft is he the cen- 
tre of the stage, his speeches are among the long- 
est and the best in the drama, his wisdom not to 
be despised and his counsel not unfrequently most 
admirable. 

He succeeds in clothing himself with a man- 
tle of such majestic innocence and ennoble- 
ment, that even Hamlet himself is sometimes de- 
ceived and fears his suspicions have been improp- 
erly aroused. In a moment of extreme anguish 
when he feels confident of the King's guilt, and 
rebukes himself with bitter curses for being 
pigeon-livered and with lack of gall to make op- 
pression bitter; he still doubts and fears that the 



ISM THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Ghost who informed him of the King's unholy 
deed may have boon untrue. 

" The spirit that 1 have seen 
May be the devil; and the devil hath power 

To assume a pleasing shape; yea. ami perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with sueh spirits. 
Abuses me. to damn me. I'll have grounds 
More relative than this. The play's the thing 
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king." 

But oven though he succeeds in catching the con- 
science of the King, and now knows that indeed 
he perpetrated the damnable deed, Hamlet is 
forced still to pause in the execution of his ven- 
geance, on account of the King's noble bearing 
and the splendid assurance of his majestic hypoc- 
risy. It seems to me this is one of the potent rea- 
sons why Hamlet so long postpones the deed upon 
which ho is bent — the killing of the King — and 
can at last achieve it only on the sudden outburst 
of a tempestuous passion, even at the point of his 
own unhappy murder. 

Hence the King to me stands as the embodiment 
of the bold, defiant, headstrong, consistent, unc- 
tious and commanding hypocrite. He is not only 



THE CHARACTERS IS HAMLET 183 



the criminal executioner of a deed whose offence 
smells rank to heaven, bat be u the proud p 

s<v.or of a regal front which he display* 

audacioui temeritj and pretention* importance. 
The supreme lesson irhich this symbolic r - racter 

teachef if that however lofty and officious may be 

on'.- who asumes to play the part of the hypocrite, 

though bii reign may be successful it must needs 

be hrif.f", and though for a time thf: god of peace 
may harbor and protect hirn, his end shall be : 

erable and his name an everlasting curse. \o art 
can deceive, no charm allay, the evil deed that 
stamps its hlight on the guilty soul. Try how 
hard he will the hypocrite knows that the deed 
will out, and no artist lives who can paint the 
hlack tiling white, or convert its ghastly checks 
of guilt to roseate innocence. As he himself, self- 
accusing, cries: 

" The harlot's check, beautified with plastering art. 
Is not more ugly to thf; thing that help* it, 
Than is my deed to my most painted word." 

Though Shakespeare has not said it, save by im- 
plication, we read into his lines the profound les- 
son that no man can triumph ultimately against 



184 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the laws of truth and right, and though he play 
the blatant hypocrite beneath the jewelled robes 
of royalty or the beggarly rags of poverty, the 
end is the same — deceit shall be defeated and jus- 
tice reign at last. 

Next we study Gertrude, the pitiable, weak and 
pliable Queen — who shall be for us the symbol of 
unamiable sinfulness by way of contrast with Ophe- 
lia, who shall become the symbol of chastest in- 
nocence, ensnared in the tangle of apparent sin 
and most ill-fated fortune. That even Hamlet 
himself believed his mother to have been wanton 
in her conduct and to have yielded to the blandish- 
ments of the "bloat King" to tempt her to inces- 
tuous indulgence, his language reveals all too 
plainly. He minces not, in that shocking scene 
where his words are as daggers and his inflections 
as the twisting of the weapon in the festering 
wound. When Gertrude, much offended at Ham- 
let's brash impertinence, exclaims, with labored 
innocence : 

" What have I done that thou dare'st wag thy 
tongue 
In noise so rude against me? " 

He responds with impetuous and cruel charge: 



Tin; CHARACTERS IS HAMLET 185 



" .Such an act 
Ae blurs the grace and blush of modesty, 
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose 
From the fair forehead of an innocent love, 
And sets a bUster there;" 

When Gertrude, seemingly most shocked, shrieks 
out: 

" Aye me, what act 
That roars so loud and thunders in the index? " 

Then Hamlet, mustering all the reserve force 
of his pent-up indignation, fearlessly exclaims: 
(as he points to tapestries that hung in the royal 
room at Elsinore whereon were inwoven the por- 
traits of the Danish Kings) :* 

" Look, here, upon this picture and on this, 
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. 
See, what a grace was seated on his brow: 
Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; 
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; 

* " On the stage Hamlet in often made to wear a miniature 
portrait of bis father round his neck, and to hold it up before 
his mother; but the words of the play prove incontestable 
that Shakespeare imagined life sized pictures hanging on the 
wall. Now we find a contemporary description of a "great 
chamber" at Kronsburg, written by an English traveller, in 
which occurs this passage: 'It is hanged with Tapistary of 
fresh colored silke without gold, wherein all the Danish 
kings are exprest in antique habits, according to their sev- 
eral times, with their arms and Inscriptions, containing all 
their conquests and victories.' " (" William Shakespeare," 
by JiuANOKS, p. 35H.) 



186 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

A combination and a form indeed, 

Where every god did set his seal, 

To give the world assurance of a man. 

This was your husband. Look now what follows: 

Here is your husband. Like a mildew'd cur, 

Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? 

Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, 

And batten on this moor? 

O shame ! where is thy blush ? Rebellious hell, 
If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones, 
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax." 

The mother, who with but weak and distressful 
lamentations can listen to such castigations from 
her horrified and unforgiving son, must indeed 
have been conscious of having sunk so deep in sin 
that reclamation is almost impossible. Whenever 
did a son so speak to a frightened mother as did 
this so called mad and frenzied Hamlet! Doubt- 
less seldom has ever a son had such just and over- 
powering cause to propel him to hot and flaming 
words, and never did a sinful mother's heart snap 
with such sudden woe. 

" O, Hamlet thou hast cleft my heart in twain " 

groans the guilt-smitten and self -convicted Ger- 
trude. Answers the heartless son: 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 187 

" Throw away the worser part of it, 
And live the purer with the other half." 

Here then in this ugly and repulsive matron, the 
mother of so pure and noble minded a son, we 
have the surprising contrast of all the wisdom, 
nobility and virtue in the youthful child, and all 
the frailty, chastelessness and guilt in the mature 
and elder parent. 

Such domestic situations doubtless do arise in 
human experience and by implication Shakes- 
peare here introduces a sharp question in Ethics, 
namely, whether an offspring has the right to act 
as censor and judge upon a parent, and convert 
the position of an underling into that of a superior. 
Here I discern a piece of refined and exquisite 
symbolism. The thought implied is that truth, 
virtue and purity ever hold authority within them- 
selves. They know not the priority of age, or the 
superiority of relationship. The parent in judg- 
ment is he who is the wiser whether he be the en- 
gendered or the engendering. He is the older 
who knows the most, feels the deepest, discerns 
with keener clarity. 

In the symbolic scene we are studying, un- 
doubtedly the matron, "the hey-day of whose 



ISvS THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

blood" is tame and waits, supposedly, upon the 
judgment, must needs have been assumed, by age, 
to have been the wiser and the safer guide than 
her hot-headed and impetuous son. Hut 'tis not 
so. The youth of thirty, a schoolboy, unsophis- 
ticated, with "apprehension like a god," anil an 
intuition that reveals the finer avenues of the 
heart to his researehful vision, is here the wiser, 
the oliler, the abler. And by the mere authority 
of his divine penetration and sense oi' impeccable 
purity he holds the right to chide, ehastise, and 
castigate his guilty mother, with a tongue that 
stings like a scorpion's telson. So in life ever the 
noble mind, the unsullied heart, the stainless char- 
acter, however young in years, speak the wisdom 
of the sage with towering force and convincing 
authority. 

Gertrude stands then to us as the symbol of 
mature folly wearing the weeds of enforced wid- 
owhood. Wed, she is, yet unwed. Chaste in law 
but foul in morals; a matron who deflowers her 
own maternity, and damns the only offspring of a 
once noble and unsullied love. No more knows she 
the ecstasy of youthful passion, whose sense in her 
is "approplex'd", and what of love she still pos- 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 189 

<■-, i-, but its mockery and vain pretence — a 
painted /lower, and a gilded beam. Such love 
young Hamlet rightlj damned and proved its 

works as damnable as hell's. 

And hard against this love, — this devil's instru- 
ment and strumpet's vanity — how artfully does 
our author introduce another, a deeper, holier, di- 
viner Jove, too pure f.o abide unharmed in this 
Veiled planet of inhuman sin, whieh lingers in our 
memory in painful contrast with the other! As 
Gertrude is the symbol of all that's vile and ven- 
omous in love, Ophelia, by contrast is the symbol 
of simple sweetness, purity, and most chaste af- 
fection. So gentle is her love, that like the timid 
fawn, it shies and flees if it be descried. So pure, 
the v('ry dews of heaven are not more chaste, ere 
they descend to kiss the vulgar fields. Her 
thoughts are as unsullied as her marble brow; her 
passion as pure as her snowy bosom ; her person 
as clean as the stainless lily. To her the tender 
and thoughtful warnings of her devoted brother, 
Laertes, are all needless, and she can but little 
comprehend them. 

"For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor," he 
reminds her, 



190 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

" Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood, 
The perfume and suppliance of a minute; 
Think of it no more. 

If with too credent ear you list his songs, 

Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open 

To his unmaster'd importunity, 

Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain. — 

Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister." 

Lightly she laughs away these weighty cautions, 
these warnings of "contagious blastments most 
imminent," and with a kiss reminds him she "shall 
the effect of this good lesson keep, as watchman to 
her heart." Yet little has she thought to seek the 
dangerous "primrose path of dalliance," of which, 
in turn playfully she warns her brother, for so 
serious is her love, already it casts athwart her 
life the prophecy of its awful blight. 

Although in the play she never, save by impli- 
cation, confesses her love, we feel it in every line 
which she speaks, in every movement of her glid- 
ing figure. Her father chides her because she is 
wont to be so much with Lord Hamlet who, he be- 
lieves, cannot love her honorably, on account of 
his high estate, and therefore naturally fears for 
her safety. But she confesses that Hamlet hath 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 191 

of late made many tenders of his affection to her. 
"Affection ! Pooh ! you speak like a green girl," 
gruffly replies the foolish old man. She never, 
however, tells directly of her love for him, al- 
though it is plain that his overtures are most 
agreeable to her. "My lord," she replies to her 
anxious father, "he hath importuned me with love 
in honorable fashion, and hath given countenance 
to his speech, with almost all the holy vows of 
heaven." 

It is all too evident that she loves him a thou- 
sand times more passionately than he loves her. 
Hers is a love that cannot be cast off, except at the 
sacrifice of her reason, for any cause. Her young 
and fragile frame is already woven into his sturdy 
figure, and unwittingly she is leaning absolutely 
on him. Like as the tendriled vine around the 
oak rises or falls with it, so must the gentle Ophe- 
lia seek alone her happiness in the brave and 
dauntless Hamlet. But if perchance he should 
ruthlessly cast her off, as in a passion one thrusts 
a timid bird from one's bosom which has sought 
refuge there in the passing storm, her fate would 
be as fatal as the bird's, and as mournful to be- 
hold! 



192 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

We cannot contemplate this possibility with 
other feelings than those of utmost sorrow — aye 
of grief that smites the inner temple of the heart. 
That a child so lovely, pure and past all fault, 
confiding most unsuspiciously in one whom she 
most justly believed to be both truthful and 
strong, should in years so young meet the blast- 
ment of unrequited affection and be abusively re- 
jected, could lead to naught but mental dethrone- 
ment, or else, had she been stronger, to suicide. 
She had known the young Hamlet, while yet he 
was an indifferent and innocent student at col- 
lege, who made ardent love to her while his mind 
was still free of trouble, perplexity, and the dis- 
mal melancholy of his vengeful mission. 

He had not yet heard the revelation of the 
atrocious manner of his noble father's taking off. 
He had not }'et seen the Ghost, nor had his brain 
been bewildered with the appalling and affright- 
ing tale of that apparition's revelation. Love was 
natural to him. He had an open and an ardent 
heart ; it yearned for responsive affection, for en- 
dearing love, and in the gentle Ophelia his mind 
discerned the reflection of his soul's ideal. What 
j oy was here ; what animate delight of prophetic 



FRANCOIS J. TALMA AS HAMLET 

I am but mad north north-west. When the 
wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a hand 
saw. Act II, Sc. II. 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 193 

unity! But anon he is not the Hamlet that had 
been ; the Hamlet of her faith and her love ! All 
changed he comes, transformed from saint to 
devil, from sage to madman. What has befallen 
him. O mortal sight! O baneful curse! She 
tells her father thus : 

" My lord as I was sewing in my closet, 
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbrac'9; 
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd; 
Ungarter'd and down-gyv'd to his ankle; 
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other; 
And with a look so piteous in purport 
As if he had been loosed out of hell 
To speak of horror — he comes to me." 

The father assures her he is mad for love of 
her. But her keener intuition divines another pur- 
port in his mien. She believes indeed he must be 
mad, but the cause she cannot divine. What won- 
der the poor girl's brain begins to reel; what 
wonder already the foreshadow of her doom is dis- 
cerned in her pale face and wandering eyes ! Soon, 
Ophelia, the feigned madness of an actor shall be- 
come so real to you, that you shall know its nature 
as well as you know yourself. 

Whatever may have been the cause or the ne- 
cessity for Hamlet to have treated as he did the 



194 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

innocent and most gentle Ophelia, how can we 
sympathize with him in the deed; nay, how can 
we forgive him? If he has conjured the idea in 
his brain, after his interview with the uncanny 
Ghost, that he must needs "put on an antic dis- 
position" and bear himself most odd or strangely, 
in order that he may deceive the Court and all 
his friends by his assumed madness, we still must 
feel a keen rebuke for him because of his bitter 
treatment of the confiding child who loved him 
so, and can but wish that his mission might have 
ended without this blight. After the tormenting 
resolution has seized and flamed his soul that he 
must avenge his father's death by the death of 
the King, his slayer, coldly he accosts Ophelia, 
whom he meets : 

" I did love you once." 

" Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so." 

"You should not have believed it; for virtue 
cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish 
of it; I loved you not." 

" I was the more deceived." 

Surely Hamlet must have felt the effect of this 
blinding blow. He must have foreseen the dizzy- 
ing state of mind it would have produced in her, 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 195 

the mental nausea, the fainting anguish, the dead- 
ening stun. At this point, it seems to me, some 
remorse seizes him, and he would mollify his 
mean offense. Hence he begins to persuade her 
that the fruitage of their mutual love would bring 
naught but pain and disappointment to them, and 
that their offspring would so much reflect his own 
sinfulness, that she would regret the conjugal 
results. Therefore he pleads with her to go to a 
nunnery. "What should such fellows as I do 
crawling between earth and heaven? We are ar- 
rant knaves all ; believe none of us. Go thy ways 
to a nunnery !" 

It is pitiful, tearful, heart-rending. Here is a 
mould of transparent marble, nay of frail and 
fragile china, suddenly smitten with a sturdy blow 
that shatters it into fragments, which never more 
can be cemented. All, all is lost to her ; the world 
is dark; its angel of light has vanished; nothing 
now inhabits it but blackest devils and prophecies 
of evil. Her young heart pours out its piteous 
grief at sight of the dethronement of reason in 
her lord and master whom she so much honored 
and adored, mingled with the consciousness of her 
own blight and irredeemable despair. 



196 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

" O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown " 
mournfully she cries, thinking but of Hamlet. 

" The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's, eye, tongue, 

sword ; 
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down! 
And I of ladies most deject and wretched, 
That suck'd the honey of his music vows, 
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, 
Like sweet bells j angled out of tune, and harsh ! 

O woe is me, 
To have seen what I have seen, to see what I 

see ! " 

But the anguish of all this is , made double 
agony if we are forced to admit that the dethrone- 
ment of reason which she beheld was only possible 
pretense, but which was so soon to become real 
and incurable in herself ! 

What more can be in store for the sweet Ophe- 
lia's ill-fated lot to deepen the darkness that en- 
closes her ? It seems to me that Shakespeare must 
have been most loath to have introduced her final 
state, and the immediate cause that led to it. That 
she should have lost her lover by a sudden blow 
of some most sinister fate, to her inscrutable, is 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 197 

indeed evil enough. But that this lover should 
become not only lost to her, but also the murderer 
of her most honored father, was such a mountain 
of evil as to have broken down the frame of one 
far stronger than she. When at last with brain 
distraught, sunken and sallow cheeks and eyes all 
glassy, she comes again upon the stage singing 
her heart-piercing snatches of sweet song, we hear 
the double-mourning strains for father lost and 
lover gone: 

" He is dead and gone, lady, 
He is dead and gone. 
At his head a grass-green turf, 
At his heels a stone." 

Surely at this sight of blasted sense and vacant 
brain — like the ruin of a noble structure, full of 
holes and windowless, through which the wanton 
wind resounds with mocking echoes — we feel like 
crying as did her horrified brother: 

" O ! heat, dry up my brains ; tears seven times salt 
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eyes ! " 

The picture is complete; another touch is im- 
possible. The artist leaves her in our memory 
clinging, as it were, to the reeling mast and rig- 



198 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ging of a tempest-tossed and foundered vessel, 
soon to be washed away by hungry waves which 
in mercy shall forever silence her aching heart. 

But she lives ever in our minds as the symbol 
of unrequited and forgotten love, too pure, too 
ethereal and divine, to have inhabited this taber- 
nacle of decaying clay. Ever thus has love, 
woven of the silken skies and silver stars, and in- 
carnate in a mortal frame, come to grief on this 
gross planet. And we fear ever shall it be so till 
some happy epoch shall abide wherein both man 
and woman shall be so divinely moulded, neither 
shall outrage the other, nor find their purposes 
awry or cast in mutual conflict. That time must 
come, when this old planet shall have grown 
young and green again, and the sons of God, eth- 
ereal offsprings of the divine, shall be so pure, 
the daughters of the earth shall welcome them, 
without reproach or sense of wrong. Till that 
time the mournful Ophelia shall abide as the 
deathless symbol of love sacrificed on the altar of 
human disparity and mortal disappointment. 

There are also other characters in the drama 
which stand boldly embossed upon the memory as 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 199 

symbols of specific phases of human life which 
space fails us here to enumerate. Polonius, the 
aged temple of wisdom, wherein forever clangs 
the garrulous tongue of warning and advice, an 
endless bore, and yet adored, beloved of all, is 
symbolic of the truth that youth's experiences 
when crystallized in age become but vapory sen- 
timent, unheeded by the young, monotonous to 
the old. Naught can teach but experience itself, 
and each one can attain to wisdom only through 
the beaten avenues of his long travelled heart. 

We have, howover, room for only one more 
symbolic character, and that the chiefest, the ob- 
served of all observers, the glass of fashion and 
the mould of form, the young and princely Ham- 
let. In order to apprehend the nature of this sym- 
bolization we must trace the lineaments of the 
character. First of all we perceive that Hamlet 
is the perfect type of the scholar — meditative, 
retrospective, studious, averse to society, living 
more in thought than deed, given to books rather 
than to men. And like many scholars, he is a cynic 
and a skeptic. But his cynicism is the outgrowth 
of his bitter experience, while his skepticism is 
the immediate result of his profound studies. He 



200 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

has penetrated every avenue of thought, and 
sought out the far "reaches of the soul," that he 
may acquire knowledge from realms beyond the 
common approaches of the mind. 

He is not, however, a dogmatic skeptic. He 
never pooh poohs or scoffs at another's claim to 
a knowledge of which he stands in ignorance. 
His skepticism is not like that of Horatio's, which 
is positive and cock-sure. When the latter was 
told of the appearances of the ghost, "tush, 
tush," he says, " 'twill not appear." When there- 
fore Horatio did really see the spirit, we may im- 
agine, having been so overwhelmlingly converted, 
he approaches Hamlet with much zeal ; and Ham- 
let knowing him to be a friend and a scholar, 
therefore, perhaps without more opposition lis- 
tened with some immediate credence to the amaz- 
ing narrative. But we see how he struggles in 
his mind with the apparition. He cannot doubt 
that he has seen it, yet what it is, whether, as it 
purports to be, "the counterfeit presentment" of 
his father, come to reveal to him the awful story 
of his taking off, or the devil in pleasing form 
come to delude and torture him, or a mere figment 
of the mind, which projects itself as 'twere an 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 201 

actual vision of the eye; — with all these phases 
of thought he struggles in profound meditation 
and conflict as only could a scholar of intense 
earnestness and large learning. 

He is indeed so much the scholar, — the cold, 
incisive thinker ; dwells so much in mental moods ; 
that his emotional nature has become suppressed ; 
his heart is buried in his head; his thoughts hold 
his feelings in a leash. This disposition affords 
him that self-control and poise which stands him 
in such good stead, through all the perilous roads 
of fortune he must needs travel. It gives him the 
courage to reproach and damn his mother with 
such resistless power that he forces confession 
from her lips and holds her like an abject slave at 
his heels. It steels his heart against the flaming 
passion he conceives for the beautiful Ophelia, 
and arms him for the cruel deed he feels necessity 
demands when with icy indifference he brushes 
her aside. By slow stages and persistent nursing 
it nerves him to the final purpose of his mission — 
the deed demanded by the Ghost, inspired by the 
love of his father, the hatred of the murderous 
King, and the welling fires of vengeance consum- 
ing all his being ; till at last 'tis done, as would a 



202 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

scholar, by a stroke of reason and self-possession 
in the very throe of death's embrace. 

He has not only the wonted knowledge of the 
scholar but the wit, the instant repartee, the mer- 
ciless logic, the supercilious consciousness of su- 
periority. Who but a scholar, with such poise of 
mien and searching study could thus have ad- 
dressed an apparition, which flashes on his vision 
"to harrow up his soul, freeze his young blood, 
make his two eyes, like stars, start from their 
spheres, and each particular hair to stand on 
end?"— 

" What may this mean, 
That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel, 
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, 
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature 
So horribly to shake our disposition 
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." 

His entire bearing at this trying period of his 
experience is that of one who knowing his ac- 
quirement, and that it is superior to the common, 
is not averse to learn still more even of the most 
arcane and apparently incredible. He does not 
hesitate to remind Horatio, also deeply learned, 
that there are more things in heaven and earth 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 203 

than are dreamed of in his philosophy. His wit 
fails him never. The aged Polonius bores him 
much, nevertheless he finds in him but a convenient 
opportunity for the playful disport of this wit, 
and makes the old man wonder at the nature of 
his madness. Polonius discovers Hamlet read- 
ing. — "What do you read, my lord." 

Hamlet: Words, words, words. 

Pol.: What is the matter, my lord? 

Ham.: Between who? 

Pol. : I mean the matter that you read, my lord. 

Ham.: Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue 
says here that old men have grey 
beards, that their faces are wrinkled, 
their eyes purging thick amber and 
plumtree gum, and that they have a 
plentiful lack of wit, together with 
most weak hams; all of which, sir, I 
most powerfully and potently believe, 
yet I hold it not honesty to have set it 
thus down; for yourself, sir, should be 
as old as I am, if, like a crab, you 
could go backward. 

Polonius: Though this be madness, there be 
method in it. 

Thus ever does Hamlet easily play his part 



204 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

with all, and in every event prove his superiority. 
But though easily he can thus play with and 
mock whom he will, his own soul is dark with fore- 
bodings and most cruel dread and disappointment. 
He confesses in a moment of confidence to Gilder- 
stern, what, no doubt, he had come to regard as 
his fixed and unalterable state of mind, in these 
mournful words: 

" I have of late, but wherefore I know not — 
lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercise; 
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition 
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a 
sterile promontory . . . .Man delights me not; no 
nor woman, neither." 

Here we discern the sly encroachment of the 
pale cast of melancholy, which, indeed, is often 
the accompaniment of the student, but doubly 
effective in Hamlet, because of the canker that is 
gnawing at his vitals. His accustomed melan- 
choly has now become so deep, and not at all as- 
sumed, that it lends a natural color to the theory 
of madness which all at court attach to him, and 
which he does not hesitate to encourage. But 
whether actually mad or not, this is evident, he 
has had cause enough for one of his frail and sen- 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 205 

sitive mould to have made him mad, and if not 
mad has all the premonitions that point to its ap- 
proach — the deep, irretrievable sorrow, the gloom 
and pessimism of despair, the force and fatality 
of a fixed idea, the sallow hue and sickly mind of 
melancholy. 

What wonder when his soul is all distraught 
with the horrifying revelation of the Ghost, and 
the gruesome deed to which it has commissioned 
him, wondering whether the Ghost may have been 
the devil and outrageously deceived him, or in very 
fact his honored father, he finds a joyful relief 
in the thought that the production of a mimic 
play upon the Court stage, in imitation of the 
murder of his father, after the manner of the 
Ghost's narrative, will finally solve the problem. 
But even here in his tedious meditation, in his 
mournful and self-chiding introspection, we see 
the deeper springs of his character, and learn to 
read him better. He has invited the players to 
recite for him and they have done it so well, by 
summoning artificial and unwonted emotion to 
their aid, merely for the purposes of their mock 
art, that he feels his own shame for having a 
cause a thousand times intenser to stir his being 



206 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

to its profoundest depths, and yet is still so lag- 
gard in duty, so impotent in feeling! 

" O what a rogue and peasant slave am I ! 
Is it not monstrous that this player here, 
But in fiction, in a dream of passion, 
Could force his soul so to his own conceit 
That from her working all his visage wann'd — 
Tears in 'is eyes, distraction in 's aspect. 

And all for nothing! 
For Hecuba! 

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba. 
Yet I! 

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peek 
Like John-a-dreams unpregnant of my cause 
And can say nothing." 

Then, as by the maddening of his speech his spirit 
catches the contagion and his rebuke grows wild 
and furious, he reveals to us the cause of all this 
agitation. It is that he is comanded b} T a father's 
spirit to perform one of the most appalling and 
defiant deeds of which his times were capable. To 
kill a king was no common deed, cheap as death 
was in that age. For a king was "hedged about 
with divinity," his was a divine right, and he who 
rebelled against him rebelled against Deity, and 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 207 

braved the chances not only of execution in this 
life but everlasting hell in the life to come. It 
is evident that it is most difficult for this medita- 
tive, philosophic, profoundly thoughtful scholar, 
to bring himself, soldier though he was, to the 
performance of a deed that required so much 
moral courage beyond the plain he was wont to 
inhabit. To rouse himself, he chides with all man- 
ner of personal abuse. 

" O, what an ass am I ! this is most brave 
That I, the son of a dear father murther'd, 
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, 
Must, like a wanton, unpack my heart with words, 
And fall a-cursing, like a drab, 
A scullion ! " 

We shall see that it is this mood that abides with 
him through all his suffering. He is so much the 
scholar, the man of thought, that it is most pain- 
ful for him to become the man of action. He could 
easily have mustered others to the performance of 
the deed, and joyfully seen his uncle slain before 
his very eyes, and then gleefully have trampled on 
the carcass. But to do it himself seems to wreck 
his being, and make him shiver with an irresistible 
pause. What is it that holds him back? Is it 



208 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

fear? Is it cowardice? Is it the thought of the 
cursing of an afterworld, "the dread of something 
after death, that puzzles the will?" I do not find 
in any of these the real cause of Hamlet's hesi- 
tancy. 

It seems to me it is merely constitutional with 
him, to shirk in the performance of a deed so 
bounding with possibilities of unseen danger and 
future revenge. Not that he fears the revenge 
on himself, or any personal danger, but that the 
instinctive analyst and thinker cannot bring him- 
self to the performance of so portentous a deed. 
For when he would act, the scholar stops to medi- 
tate, and "the native hue of resolution is sicklied 
o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

We see this forcibly exemplified in the chapel 
scene where Hamlet suddenly overtakes the King, 
his uncle, at his prayers, and where in an instant 
the deed can be done and all the agony of his 
mental distress forever ended. Now had he been 
merely an impulsive passionate man, moved by the 
sudden fires of his soul, he would have been over- 
joyed at the opportunity and madly rushed upon 
the King, sword in hand, and thrust it through 
his bowels. But hear him : 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 209 

" Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; 
And now I'll do it." 

It would seem that his courage has at last ar- 
rived and the act will be done upon the instant. 
But see how quickly the actor vanishes in the 
dreamer, resolution dissolves in contemplation. 
About to rush on him with his sword, he suddenly 
recalls a theological reason which makes him halt, 
and compels him to give vent to all his courage 
in a vapory soliloquy that gives his heated blood 
time to cool and disappoints the opportunity. He 
suddenly thinks if he slays the King at prayers 
he helps to save the King in the after life: 

"And so he goes to heaven; 
And so am I revenged." 

Now none but a hesitant scholar would have 
trumped up such an excuse for the postponement 
of an act for whose opportunity he had been long 
awaiting. To me it is not a serious reason that 
Hamlet here presents for his failure to act. He 
simply cannot bring himself in cold blood to per- 
form the hideous deed. 

For his father's sake he would gladly do it ; for 
duty's sake he feels that he must, for he has so 



210 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

vowed and sworn. But for his own sake he hesi- 
tates, and, thinker that he is, so long as he has a 
chance to think but a moment of what he is about 
to do, he will recoil and waive away the opportun- 
ity. He can kill, and seem to feel but little af- 
fected by it, as in the unpremeditated murder of 
Polonius. But it must be in the sudden rush of 
blood to his head, and in a storm of passion that 
sweeps over his soul, forcing him to act on the in- 
stant and leaving not an instant for contempla- 
tion. This was indeed the manner by which he 
finally accomplished the fulfilment of his vow. He 
learns that the King, his detestable uncle, has been 
plotting against his life, and has made a compact 
with Laertes, whom he had thought an honorable 
contestant in a duel. The King has arranged with 
Laertes to use a poisoned weapon, and in the duel 
Laertes thrusts the venomed point into the flesh 
of Hamlet, but in so doing drops his foil, which 
to the King's amazement Hamlet seizes. Then 
Laertes, dying, reveals the secret and exposes the 
guilty trap of the King's plot; when Hamlet, him- 
self dying, suddenly overwhelmed with a renewed 
consciousness of the damnable monster who sits on 
the throne, remembering his vow to his father's 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 211 



spirit still unfulfilled, and now well knowing that 
if not done this instant it never will be, propelled 
by a sudden wave of fury, rushes on the King 
seated on his throne, and at last succeeds in doing 
that in which he had always failed when time was 
present to meditate upon the quality and horror 
of the deed. 

Of what, then, does Hamlet, as a resplen- 
dent and universal symbol, ever remind us ; with 
his noble speech, inculcating it — his lamentable 
life, its incarnation? It seems to me it is this: — 
The scholar has his mission ; the patriot his. The 
one is made for thought, the other for action. The 
one is impetuous and rash, the other contempla- 
tive and calm. The patriot foreruns the scholar, 
the scholar conserves the patriot's fortune and 
success, and builds the stability of the nation. 

Too commonly the patriot is the mere soldier, 
and with wild and irresistible spirit leads ever on 
to war, his trade, regardless of material or moral 
consequence. The mission of the scholar is ever 
to hold in check the impetuosity of the soldier. 
Blessed is that people whose soldiers are led by 
her scholars, and sad indeed that nation whose sol- 
diers are her only guides. 



212 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

We have even today much need of this true sym- 
bol of a most useful life. Courage is not always 
displayed in the mailed fist or the threatening 
sword. It is sometimes easy to whip, but to bear 
the after effects calls for even sterner courage 
than the initial step. It often requires more temer- 
ity to cause a nation to halt in its hasty course 
than to be ready to join the popular chorus and 
shout for victory on the battle-field. Hamlet well 
knew that he was much beloved by all the people, 
that his father had been most honored by them, 
and that he could in all probability persuade them 
that the revelation of the spirit was a truth — for 
that was an age that took kindly to ghostly appa- 
ritions — but with all this in his favor he persisted 
in his hesitancy, halted ever by his deeper thought, 
— his deeper motive sheathing his too eager sword. 

With Hamlet our hearts must needs be sad; 
for we see in him the reflection of so much of the 
unhappiness of life, so often fated on those who 
are apparently so well fitted for fortunate and 
useful careers. He achieved no noble mission — 
his whole life was narrowed, cramped and cribbed, 
because of the duty of vengeance that was im- 
posed on his too feeble soul. But what shall we 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 213 

say of a "spirit" that carries with it into the after 
world such desire for vengeance and heaps the 
hideous duty on a sensitive and most noble soul? 
That is a question too horrible to contemplate. 
It is the age that alone must be blamed for such 
a reproachful and distressful fact. 

Young Hamlet, symbolic victim of an epoch of 
gloomy superstition, represents to us the concrete 
consequence of a hell-conceived and cruel creed, 
responsible for the darkest periods of human his- 
tory. This much we learn from this sad and 
mournful life : Vengeance is a deed the devil alone 
if he exist should covet, and none of us should be 
his willing agent in its foul accomplishment. Ham- 
let also stands for us the pitiable symbol of Ven- 
geance personified — and in this woeful wreck of 
"a piece of work, noble in reason, infinite in fac- 
ulty, the beauty of the world, the paragon of ani- 
mals," in this "quintescence of dust" that dis- 
solves in "a foul and pestilent congregation of 
vapors," we discern the unhappy comment on a 
life given over to the achievement of one deed, in 
; tself, appalling, in its results deplorable. 

Hamlet, the scholar, the thinker, bearing with 
composure "the proud man's contumely," wear- 



214 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ing the fardels, to grunt and sweat under a weary 
life if need be, hoping sometime honorably to 
rise, quenching never the fires of aspiration and 
ascending hope, we cannot but admire, honor and 
adore. 

It is this Hamlet, we should hold in mind as our 
model. Not the Hamlet of vengeance, breathing 
the spirit of murder, spurred by a phantom, mad- 
dened by a dream. This lesson the noble Hamlet 
teaches us, that when a sorrowful notion wanders 
into the mind, seizing it with such frenzy it occu- 
pies the place of reason, and sways the final scep- 
tre of authority, it is our duty to rouse ourselves 
and drive it from the throne. Reason must ever 
be supreme and alone in power. 

Hamlet's brain was twisted by a Ghost! His 
conscience was blighted by a maddening appari- 
tion that may have been the figment of the brain. 
His reason sank when his superstition rose. He 
allied himself with bloody monsters when once he 
suffered his mind to be occupied by the vacuous 
dreams of innocent deceivers. The next world 
must at least have a moral code as good as ours. 
If then a ghost, in fact or imagination, arises and 
commands us to execute a deed which violates the 



THE CHARACTERS IN HAMLET 215 

moral code of this world, we know that such a 
ghost is unworthy our attention, and we should 
rather wish to enlighten it, than submit to its 
irrational and immoral words. 

Here Hamlet the scholar failed to perform a 
duty to himself. His reason fled, his supersti- 
tion won, because his heart ran away with his 
head, his passion with his peace of mind. Intelli- 
gence alone prevails. Truth alone conquers and 
establishes the happiness of life. Despite all 
foibles, spirits, the traps of feeling, or deceptions 
of the mind, we have learned from Hamlet this 
simple lesson, it is better to be true to one's self / 
and the higher motives of the mind informed, 
than to be propelled by unschooled emotions, 
however dear they may be to the heart, or allur- 
ing with deceptive promise. 



VII 
THE ART AND MORALE OF THE PLAY 



THE ART AND MORALE OF THE PLAY 

IN presenting a few final conclusions concern- 
ing Shakespeare's Hamlet I desire especially 
to comment on the method of the art employed by 
the author and to study the question of how far 
the motif and denouement of the play are true to 
natural laws and human experience. Of course a 
playwright is allowed a considerable latitude in 
the manipulation of natural situations and logical 
sequences in the pursuance and evolution of his 
plot, and we are not justified in holding him too 
rigorously to the blunt and familiar facts of life. 
Nevertheless we are justified in criticising the 
author's scheme, once he has outlined it, and in 
commenting on his failure to attain a climax if 
he appear to. 

Now, perhaps the most rational criticism to be 
made on this dramatic masterpiece is that al- 
though it delineates with such precision and accu- 
racy the salient features of human life, and draws 
with such unerring truthfulness the evolution of a 
strong character under the pressure of most heart- 
rending and brutal events, nevertheless as a play, 
as a work of dramatic art, it is irregular, illogical, 
219 



220 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the thread of the motif being several times lost in 
the incoherent scenes, and a climax at last at- 
tained which is apparently beyond the pale of the 
original intention, as indicated in the first scenes 
of the play. 

In order to appreciate this criticism let me call 
attention to the fact that first, the Ghost is intro- 
duced as one of the most potent and important of 
all the springs with which the dramatist would 
move the machinery of his story. The advent of 
the Ghost is the occasion for the introduction of 
the plot and purpose of the play, and the pivot as 
it were on which revolves the character of the hero 
in its precarious and uncertain evolution. 
Through the first three acts the theory of the plot 
is that the office of the Ghost in the affairs of 
Hamlet has been such as to cause him to become 
utterly indifferent to all else in life save the carry- 
ing forward of the Ghost's commission and the 
successful consummation of vengeance on the 
reigning King. 

Now from the first scene through three acts — 
from the advent of the Ghost to the furious inter- 
locution between Hamlet and his mother in her 
boudoir — the story runs evenly and with increas- 
ing interest till the final climax is attained. 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 221 

But at this juncture it will be observed there is 
a sudden and surprising halt or hesitancy in the 
progress of the plot, and the ultimate vengeance 
of Hamlet in the final act is achieved in a manner 
not at all indicated as a possibility in the preced- 
ing stages of the drama. It is quite evident that 
two climaxes are developed in the evolution of the 
play, the first of which is natural, logical and 
easily achieved; but the second is apparently an 
after thought, a sudden diversion, the author al- 
most beginning the story over again and slowly 
working up to a startling and altogether surpris- 
ing finale. In the first part of the play the Ghost 
is the piece de resistance, all the theory of the ac- 
tion emanating from the revelations and injunc- 
tions which it delivers to Hamlet. From this 
juncture he casts away all previous purposes of 
life and begins his work anew. 

" I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
And thy commandment all alone shall live 
Within the hook and volume of my brain." 

This fact remains literally true until the climax 
at the close of third act. But then the motif, or 
at least its even unfoldment, seems suddenly to 



222 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

lag, not to say retrogress. Hamlet after having 
secured all the palpable and absolute evidence he 
could require as to the guilt of the reigning King, 
and the unqualified truthfulness of the Ghost's 
story, instead of rushing on his victim, now that 
he had him in his power, halts, hesitates and fal- 
ters, till his game has flown and his opportunity 
is lost. Then Hamlet goes off to England, and 
after his sudden and unexpected return, instead 
of setting out again on his mission of trapping 
and slaying the King, he allows himself to become 
involved in a fanciful and ridiculous altercation 
with Laertes, wherein, to please the whim of the 
King (his bete noire and especial object of ha- 
tred), he becomes wounded, and finally stabs his 
royal uncle not to avenge the death of his father 
or to fulfil the mission of the Ghost (which ob- 
jects seem to have been lost sight of), but to pun- 
ish him for the Queen's death and his own mortal 
wound. 

We should not of course permit ourselves to 
overlook the fact that when his final passion of 
anger and vengeance was aroused, through the in- 
stigation of his own wound, the death of his 
mother and Laertes' revelation of the immediate 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 223 

infamy of the King, that these new discoveries of 
the King's diabolical character could in his mind 
have combined with the horror already aroused in 
him by the information imparted by the Ghost, 
and thus together have piled up a mountain of 
evidence whose weight crushed him with convic- 
tion, and drove him to that act which heretofore 
he had never been able to accomplish. 

But whether this be so or not, it is certainly a 
disappointment in his character that he was ever 
so slow and hesitant in performing a deed to which 
he was originally impelled by the discovery of his 
uncle's guilt — in his father's taking off — and 
must needs wait till personal injury be inflicted on 
himself, and death already hold him in its reeking 
clutch, before he can bring himself to act. 

These are the two chief weaknesses and appar- 
ent inconsistencies of the performance. When a 
man, as strong physically and in moral courage 
as Hamlet, learns of the enormity of his uncle's 
crime, a person whom he already hates because of 
his hasty marriage with his too wanton mother, 
why should he so long hesitate in performing the 
deed to which he is impelled by both heaven and 
hell? Especially, after he has secured that very 



THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



€vidence which he himself assures his confidant 
friend will be all sufficient to prove the King's 
guilt, and when he has the King in his very clutch 
and may, in the presence of the Court and in full 
justification of his deed, plunge the dagger in his 
breast, why does he still hesitate and falter? 

He cries to Horatio after the King gave way 
under the scorching and all too insinuating alle- 
gory of the mock drama, and fled from his throne 
gasping for breath and crying for light — "I'll 
take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound." 
And yet notwithstanding all this, he accomplishes 
nothing, but permits himself to be waylaid by the 
King's counter plot and to be exiled to England. 
This appears not only like a weakness in the char- 
acter of the hero but more especially a serious 
weakness in the logical plot of play. 

An artistic anomaly seems here to be introduced 
by the greatest dramatic artist of the ages. He 
makes a genuine climax nothing but an anti-cli- 
max. Undoubtedly never did an author more suc- 
cessfully and powerfully pass from the exordium 
to the peroration of a performance, than did 
Shakespeare in the evolution of this drama, from 
the advent of the Ghost to the triumph of the 



BOOTH 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 225 

mock play in the presence of the Court. But 
what an utter disappointment is it to the audience 
that, after all the slow and ponderous procedure 
of the heavy plot, after the continuous and un- 
flagging emphasis of the interest of the play up 
to the very pith and marrow of its climax, sud- 
denly, when the arm of vengeance is already lifted 
and the victim lies helpless beneath the blow, in- 
stead of striking, the hero dances madly in a 
frenzy of delight and lets his prey fly from him 
while he shouts: — 

" Why let the strucken deer go weep, 
The hart ungalled play; 
For some must watch while some must sleep; 
So runs the world away." 

Surely, here is a break and disappointment in 
the plot. And it appears that it must have been 
such also to the author. For he does not again 
reach a similar height in the entire tragedy, but 
waits till the very last moment, and then, as by 
a sudden inspiration, sees a way out of his per- 
plexity by conceiving that in a mere bloodless duel 
one of the contestants play false and thus make 
possible the final logical slaughter of the King. 



226 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

It is perhaps audacious for one to criticise the 
art of so great a master; yet I do so not in any 
sense pretending to be the first to call attention to 
the matter, for it is an old criticism and has never 
been successfully answered. As far back as 1736 
Sir Thomas Hanmer called attention to this weak- 
ness and incongruity in the art of Shakespeare, 
and ever since critics have been discussing it pro 
and con. Every sort of answer logical, illogical, 
fanciful and practical, has been forced into val- 
iant service in defence of the author. 

One of the most ingenious is that of a brilliant 
German critic, Klein, who insists that Hamlet's 
utter inability to act in final vengeance is to be 
attributed to the fact that he was unable to reveal 
to the populace the material proof of the King's 
guilt, and if he thus acted he would be thought to 
be but a madman and throw himself as a victim to 
the mob. This explanation to me seems, however, 
wholly unsatisfactory. In that age belief in ghosts 
was not as extraordinary and bizarre as it is in 
our own. The multitude of that age would easily 
credit a man of Hamlet's character and popular- 
ity, if he declared to them that he had seen a 
Ghost and that that Ghost had revealed to him 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 227 

the enormous criminality of the reigning King. 
Besides, Hamlet had not himself only to depend 
on, but also his three staunch and fearless friends, 
who were soldiers of the realm, one of whom was 
especially noted for his scholarship and incredu- 
lity in such matters. But above all, there stands 
over against this theory the fact that the former 
King Hamlet was highly beloved of his people 
and his recent taking off was then bitterly 
mourned by them all. And in addition to this im- 
portant fact is to be recounted the other, that 
young Hamlet himself was the cynosure and ob- 
ject of especial admiration throughout the land. 
This the King himself thoroughly appreciates and 
relates to Laertes : In answer to his question why 
he himself does not proceed against young Hamlet 
because he slew the Court's premier, the King an- 
swers : 

" Why to a public count I do not go, 
Is the great love the general gender bear him." 

He then intimates that the general gender (i. e. 
the people) — would overlook all his faults and 
prefer to believe his sins were his graces, his 
crimes his works of glory. The unpopularity of 



228 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the reigning King is also evidenced in the sud- 
den insurrection which Laertes was able to arouse 
on his return from France. If Laertes who was 
an absent soldier with no claim to the throne could 
so easily stir public sympathy in his favor, how 
much more speedily and successfully could not 
Hamlet with such profound motives as stirred his 
soul? It seems to me therefore that such at- 
tempted explanations are as ridiculous as they are 
futile. 

Unless we admit that Hamlet's character is in- 
consistently constructed by the author, I see no 
other explanation of Hamlet's inability to con- 
summate the one chief purpose of his life, than 
what is to be attributed to his instinctive contem- 
plativeness and mood of philosophical abstraction. 

I wish however, here, to suggest another mo- 
tive for Hamlet's persistent and apparently in- 
consistent hesitancy in executing vengeance on 
the King, which I do not remember to have seen 
anywhere else referred to. To me, it occurs, that 
Hamlet's intense love for his mother, and her re- 
ciprocal love for him, may have entered very 
largely into the cause of his so-called inaction. 
When the play opens it must not be forgotten 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 229 

Hamlet is extremely angry with his mother. Be- 
fore the scene in her closet, when he so mercilessly 
cauterises her heart with the acids of sarcasm and 
accusation, he would apparently as joyously have 
executed vengeance on her as on his uncle. But 
he has been enjoined by the Ghost not to harm 
her, and therefore he durst not. Nevertheless, 
until that scene he believed she was in complicity 
with the King in consummating his father's mur- 
der. The Ghost had neither affirmed nor denied 
this supposition. Hamlet was free to believe 
what he chose. Therefore in his angry outburst 
in the closet scene he directly accuses her of the 
guilt : 

" A bloody deed ! Almost as bad good mother, 
As kill a King and marry with his brother ! " 

Nevertheless, before the scene is over they are 
completely reconciled, and never again in the play 
does he rail against his mother, but everywhere 
exhibits filial love and regard for her. When he 
is banished to England he thinks at once of his 
mother and bids her alone adieu, sarcastically 
avoiding the King. When the final duel is fought, 
the Queen shows Hamlet every attention of love 



230 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

and tenderness, even disobeying the King by 
drinking from the cup Hahnct had offered her, — 
against his royal will ; and her son in all regards 
reciprocates the evident affection which prevails 
between them. This fact is more clearly brought 
out in the early edition of the play issued in 1603 
wherein the Queen ends the unhappy scene in the 
closet by entering into a conspiracy with Hamlet 
to catch the King by strategy and thus uniting 
with him in final vengeance. 

Here then it seems to me we discover something 
of a rational and natural reason for the hesi- 
tancy of Hamlet in punishing the King with 
death. The fact that Shakespeare cancels that 
portion of the original draft of the play in which 
he causes the Queen to join Hamlet in conspiracy 
against the King, would seem to indicate that 
Shakespeare himself had this thought in mind. 
For if the queen were in collusion with Hamlet to 
waylay and kill the King, then Hamlet need not 
hesitate to consummate the act at any time, lest 
he might cause the Queen such burden of grief, as 
might be too oppressive for her to endure. There- 
fore, apparently, Shakespeare altered this pas- 
sage and merely permitted the Queen to become 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 231 



reconciled with her son, but remain wholly igno- 
rant of his designs against the King's life. This 
would leave a rational and logical reason for the 
postponement of Hamlet's deed of vengeance, lest 
fie might break his mother's heart, who the 
Ghost had told him was weak and susceptible, and 
enjoined him to protect from injury and distress. 
If he avenge his murdered father on the King who 
is now his mother's husband, he must needs cause 
her grief and unendurable anguish. How then 
can he accomplish what the Ghost commands and 
still relieve his mother? How pursue the plan 
that has been revealed to him by supernatural 
powers and still save her such natural suffering as 
would follow the consummation of his mission? 

This then becomes the crux of his problem, the 
stress of his life. What wonder he is perplexed, 
downcast, distracted and vacillating between two 
ways? True, the author does not anywhere show 
in the speeches or even the actions of Hamlet that 
this is the chief motive and cause of his hesitancy, 
and that around this puzzling problem revolves 
the entire mystery of the play. But it seems to 
me he makes his work the stronger by keeping this 
motive in the background and permitting the 



232 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

reader's mind to be the more perplexed by under- 
taking to solve the problem. The fact that no 
student for these three hundred years has yet dis- 
covered a cause of sufficient force to satisfy the 
thinking world, why Hamlet's character is so in- 
consistent, proves how effective the supposed de- 
sign of the author had been in kindling the curi 
ositj 7 of his readers and defying the acumen of 
his critics. 

I cannot, therefore, but feel that there is some- 
thing in the nature of genuine discovery in the 
theory I am now advancing, namely, that the real 
cause of the disappointing hesitancy of Hamlet 
was his filial affection and sincere devotion to his 
maternal parent. If this theory be accepted it 
adds another jewel to the crown of Hamlet's vir- 
tues, and must needs set him even higher on the 
pinnacle of our admiration. Having found that 
his mother was wholly deceived in the murder of 
his father, and was in no way involved in that foul 
deed, and that she married her second husband 
with sincere affection and was honorably bound to 
him by ties of conjugal obligation, he could not 
but have profoundly pitied her ; and yet, while he 
must needs the less admire her seeing she still 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 233 

clings to one whom she now knew was the mur- 
derer of her first husband, nevertheless, being his 
mother he could not but feel sorrowful for her in 
her sad extremity, and yield to an impulse to save 
her from all possible additional misery. 

Therefore while he feels bound by the ties of 
sacred devotion to his unhappy father to consum- 
mate the commission of vengeance on which he 
has set out, still he so much pities his mother, and 
is so constantly conscious of the increased suffer- 
ing it will bring upon her should he do what the 
Ghost has commanded, that he halts at every op- 
portunity which presents itself, and sinks back 
into melancholy and contemplation without 
achievement. 

This theory seems to me to be still more empha- 
sized in the final denouement. Hamlet had per- 
mitted himself to be persuaded to play at swords 
to please the King; to parry with foils against 
Laertes merely to give the King some innocent 
pleasure. This act appeals to me almost like an 
absurdity. Why should Hamlet who has been ly- 
ing awake nights and turning daylight into dark- 
ness in his soul by plotting instant vengeance on 
the King, his mortal enemy, now so suddenly turn 



234 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

friend and sportive swordsman to tickle his royal 
fancy and afford him idle pastime? It would 
seem that Hamlet would scarcely lend himself to 
such a childish performance, especially merely to 
afford the King a chance to win a bet, unless he 
had some concealed design which he would hope to 
consummate in the incidents of the sport. 

We may assume, however, that Hamlet per- 
mitted himself to be persuaded to this perform- 
ance rather to gratify the pleasure of Laertes 
than that of the King. He had offended Laertes 
in a fit of passion which he sorely regretted. He 
therefore would fence in play with him and thus 
when opportunity afforded beg his pardon for 
his madman's act. Now up to this point there is 
nothing in the evolution of the drama to indicate 
how the final climax is to be reached. The gran- 
deur of this act lies in its startling and unantici- 
pated surprise. The entire plot is suddenly 
changed, and what has been scarcely more than a 
mournful drama heretofore, is instantly converted 
into realistic tragedy. How does the author 
achieve this coup ! 

While they are fencing some one cries out the 
Queen is fainting. Hamlet is already wounded 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 235 

and he naturally suspects foul play. Then when 
the Queen exclaims that the drink has poisoned 
her and Laertes reveals the plot against his life, 
Hamlet's passion towers sublimely and in a trice 
he accomplishes that for which heretofore his life 
has been wasted in vain. What gives him his final 
courage and inspiration to action? Clearly, it 
seems to me, it is the fact that now he not only 
had double, yea treble cause, for fearless ven- 
geance, but that the chief and immediate ground 
for his paltering inaction — his beloved mother — 
being now removed — he may without fearing to 
harm a hair of her head plunge his hungry dagger 
into the breast of the "murderous, lecherous 
King." 

If we accept this theory it would seem to re- 
store consistency and natural progress in the de- 
velopment of the plot, and remove one of the most 
perplexing problems which has ever confronted 
the students of literature. It will also elevate 
Hamlet in our minds as a noble son and an honor- 
able gentleman ; proving that much as he felt 
prompted to obey the command of a supernatural 
commission, he could not perform it while it 
brought pain to the already bleeding heart of his 



236 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



beloved mother. But that so soon as tender con- 
sideration for her was unnecessary, he rises to the 
supreme command of his life, and without, a 
thought of himself or his fate achieves what 
though most distasteful to his finer nature must 
be done by divine authority. 

What then shall we say, in fine, as to the morale 
of the phi}' ? Is it ethical in spirit and does it in- 
culcate a lofty purpose and inspiration in life? 
Of course its situations are so extraordinary and 
exceptional that its application can be only indi- 
rect to our age and to individual students. That 
it preaches a sublime moral truth cannot be ques- 
tioned. Though it is a most gloomy and soul-be- 
nighting story ; though it carries the reader into 
the outmost: purlieus of human misery and indi- 
vidual criminality ; though it deals with things 
most brutal, bloodthirsty and murderous; though 
its every character is bestecped in deepest fumes 
of foul concoctions from the nethermost hells of 
human life ; yet its issues are wholesome and its 
preachments are pure. 

Never has the enormity of crime been better 
exposed. Never has the sweeping searchlight of 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 237 

earthly wisdom played more effectively upon the 
sea of human action, revealing its every motive 
and unveiling its profoundest secrets, than in this 
masterly piece of art. Evil, though for awhile 
triumphant and swayed with sceptred power, is 
soon o'erthrown and whelmed in agonizing defeat. 
Murder will out; sin will sometime lay naked on 
the rocks exposed to the gaze of all ! No closet 
is large or deep enough, or buried low enough in 
any cellarage, to shut the skeleton from the eyes 
of day, or seclude it from human discovery. "Foul 
deeds shall rise though earth o'erwhelm them to 
men's eyes." This is the emphatic, persistent and 
unrelenting teaching of the play. Try how hard 
he will ; though disguised in the royal gowns of 
kingly courts ; though wearing the crown of auth- 
ority, and swaying the power of state; the crimi- 
nal shall at last be found, wrenched by the hands 
of justice from his throne and trampled to death 
beneath the feet of the avenging mob. And jus- 
tice shall put its sword of vengeance even in the 
hand of love. 

That, that men need most to woo them from hu- 
man cares and earthly wretchedness, from the bit- 
terness of affliction and the despair of misery, jus- 



238 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

tice shall employ against the guilty. The heart, 
that was made for love and by nature responds 
with filial devotion, shall be made the chalice from 
which the criminal ingrate must needs quaff the 
poisoned liquor to his own damnation, that justice 
and love together may triumph and henceforth 
equally together reign. Such to my mind are the 
teachings of this morose and melancholy tragedy. 
It fits this age as any. For human nature is ever 
the same and human crime unchanged. Murder 
today is perhaps not as common as in the days of 
Hamlet ; but the self-same spirit that prompted to 
murder — ambition, lust of power and illicit love — 
are today as strong in the avenues of life as ever. 
Their issue also today is the same. 

He who sins against his own conscience suffers. 
He who darkens the light of truth in his own soul 
and chafes at the invitations of noble purpose 
and pure affection, must reap the harvest of self- 
delusion, and the dire vengeance of outraged jus- 
tice, as certain as the night treads on the skirts 
of day, as death follows life. These are the pal- 
pable preachments of Shakespeare's mighty tra- 
gedy of Hamlet. Indeed the play is a sermon — a 
continuous preaching of one long sermon. So 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 239 

true is this that as some of the French critics say 
it is a weakness in the playwright's art. The 
drama, however, itself preaches enough, so that if 
the long sermonistic soliloquies were extracted, the 
action is sufficiently serious, the individual suffer- 
ing sufficiently intense, and the ensemble solemn 
enough, to impress the most indifferent with the 
palpable lessons the play imparts. 

Only a great sufferer can be a great poet. The 
man who wrote this drama must have known 
either by experience or through intuition all the 
gamut of human passion, all the pangs of human 
ambition. His heart was the teacher of his head. 
His story was written in blood spilt from the 
veins of conscious misery. No man could depict 
the mental and moral agonies of such a character 
as Hamlet without having in some measure him- 
self been the part. Either in this life or some 
other that history had been forewritten on the 
tablets of his experience, and were here set forth 
as memories to lighten the burden of his soul. 
Shakespeare indeed was Hamlet, Hamlet was 
Shakespeare. In some sense this must have been 
his biography. Therefore perhaps we love this 



240 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

tragedy better than any other of his, because we 
feel instinctively that somehow it lets the light 
into his own life and affords us a faint glimpse of 
his profound, reclusive nature. To become ac- 
quainted with one such soul in this pilgrimage of 
earth is to have trod close to Parnassus and felt 
the touch of a god! How thankful must we be 
not only that he has lived but that his works re- 
main behind. O enviable immortality, when 
thoughts become immortalized in words that shall 
abide as long as tongue has speech and a heart 
shall beat in human breast ! 



On page 230 I referred to the Quarto edition of Hamlet 
(1603) wherein it was plainly shown by Shakespeare that 
not only was he reconciled with the Queen but that she was 
privy to his plot to kill the King and had agreed to join 
him in his intrigue. As this fact is not known to the aver- 
age reader of the current play it might be well to introduce 
the conversation between Hamlet and his mother as pre- 
sented in that early edition. It follows the entrance of the 
Ghost when Hamlet is closeted with his mother : 

Queen 

Alas ! it is the weakness of thy brain 

Which makes thy tongue to blazon forth thy grief; 

But as I have a soul I swear by Heaven, 

I never knew of this most horrible murder. 

But Hamlet, this is only phantasie, 

And for my love forget thy idle fits. 



THE MORALE OF THE PLAY 241 



Hamlet 

Idle? No mother my pulse doth beat like yours; 
It is not madness that possesseth Hamlet. 

mother if ever you did my dear father love, 
Forebeare the adulterous bed tonight, 

And win yourself by little as you may, 

In time it may be that you will loath him quite; 

And mother but assist me in revenge 

And in his death your infamy shall die. 

Queen 

Hamlet, I vow by that Majesty, 

That knows our thoughts and looks into our hearts, 

1 will conceal and do my best, 

What stratagem soe'er thou shalt devise. 

Hamlet 

It is enough, mother; good night. 



VIII 

THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE AS A 
LIBERAL EDUCATION 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE AS A 
LIBERAL EDUCATION 

* I ^HE character of the mind is made by the 
■*■ company it keeps. Its powers unfold in ac- 
cordance with the geniality of the atmosphere that 
environs it. If it move in the chilly air of unim- 
passioned thought and intellectual pursuit, its 
beams are like the nightly moon's, cold, flameless 
and reflective. The mind that thrives in the dry 
light of abstract speculation or abtruse reason 
will evermore reveal itself in expression lofty and 
aloof, welcome to those only who contemplate 
things far removed from ordinary human interest. 
Such minds search out and find the truth in the 
recondite recesses of nature, and reveal her, naked 
and ungarnished, to the wondering eyes of men. 
Such minds determine to discover and divulge the 
truth at whatever cost of feeling, sensibility or 
pain, that men may know, though knowledge be- 
wilder and confound them. Such minds are heart- 
less though potent; irresistible and relentless. 
These are the scientists, the physicists, the pro- 
found and persistent travellers on the highway of 
knowledge, around whom ever shines the icy radi- 
245 



246 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ance of intellectual glory, far reaching, penetrat- 
ing and electric. 

He who bathes his mind in their atmosphere, 
like them is swathed with light, light that falls 
as from reflecting icicles, pendant in the frozen 
air. Clear, crisp and penetrating as the wintry 
wind is each thought that emanates from such 
source, and cast in icy moulds. Here dwells not 
the poet, philosopher, dreamer. In such an arctic 
zone are found no pictures of the imagination, no 
tropes of poesy, no metaphors of phantasy. All 
must be cold, colorless and faithful to fact. 
Fancy has here no play ; for fancy though pleas- 
ing to the soul, oft misleads the mind through 
error's devious paths. 

Such minds are necessarily equipped with but a 
limited vocabulary ; for their modes of expression 
are restricted and somewhat stereotyped. They 
dwell much in technical terms which can be used 
but little in other applications. They have no 
need to study the fine and sometimes fanciful 
shades of difference that are found between words 
of close resemblance, in which the poet's muse dis- 
cerns the flitting feelings of the heart caught in 
momentary expression. To the cold intellectual 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 24*7 

mind each word can have but one meaning, self- 
same and everlasting. He reads the stars in their 
several relations, expressed with mathematical ex- 
actitude, and plies his minute measuring rod to 
the uttermost parts of the infinite, merely that he 
may set down and note in figures, of illimitible 
proportions, the results of his research. He pur- 
sues history for dates, events, and the boundless 
summary of human vicissitude, storing his brain 
with mummified memories and fossilized relics of 
human lives. 

To him history is merely a tabulated record of 
events; the planet but a stage for the enactment 
of transitory scenes; life itself but the result of 
interacting forces whose laws are determinable, 
whose existence is ephemeral. Vast are the 
achievements of such for they are in constant com- 
munion with nature and are dragging from her 
inmost depths the secrets long concealed from hu- 
man view. They are the builders, whose labor is 
confined to laying the firm foundation, and rear- 
ing the substantial temple of human culture ; but 
it must remain for others to complete and deco- 
rate the inner walls, to cover the canopied ceiling 
with gorgeous frescoes, to hang the silken draper- 



248 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

ies, arrange the rich and massive furniture, and 
set the resplendent statuary as delicate taste and 
refined sentiment may demand. 

Then, other minds are there whose contempla- 
tive moods dissolve each golden beam of light into 
its several rays, studying each apart, yet in such 
manner as to recognize the inseparable union of 
them all. To such there is nothing single or dis- 
crete in nature; her infinite variety is but the 
changing expression of her perfect unity; un- 
broken in its essence ; illusive in manifestation. 
He alone sees with the Inward Eye, through whose 
lens the transitory and confusing phenomena of 
the outward world converge in a single conscious- 
ness, emblematic of the Oneness of Being in which 
all things abide. His is the mind of the philoso- 
pher, the metaphysician, the poet-thinker, the ra- 
tional dreamer. Language is to him not the ve- 
hicle of what he beholds with the eye of flesh, but 
what reason reveals to him in self -analysis and 
spiritual contemplation. His speech is not so 
labelled that each word stands out, of itself, self- 
explanatory and intelligible to the unlettered 
mind. His words are not facts, events, or com- 
monplaces of the world's affairs. They are sym- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 249 



bols, darkly indicative of recondite meanings, 
which alone the mind prepared can penetrate and 
comprehend. 

As rare, and undiscovered ores, for ages buried 
in the bowels of the earth, have ages since scat- 
tered their symptoms athwart the soil, which oft 
the rude and plodding mountaineer has, unno- 
ticed, smote beneath his heel, but which to the tu- 
tored mind reveal a world of unimagined wealth ; 
so, from the unfathomed depths of his profound 
research, the contemplative philosopher spreads 
here and there a symptom — an intimation — of his 
knowledge, which but sympathetic minds can 
grasp, and to the unprepared are meaningless as 
broken snatches of forgotten songs. His 
speeches are dark, his sayings cast in similitudes 
which only those can grasp who walk in the light 
that he beholds. 

Language is like the spectral boundaries of lu- 
minous bodies. They reflect the exact form and 
image of the visible orb, but so vague that only 
the practiced eye can discern them. Yet when 
once beheld they add lustre to the figure, and sta- 
bility, by their presence. Hence they who dwell 
upon the promontories of human contemplation, 



250 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

who absorb the rarified atmosphere of intellectual 
mountain heights, and stretch their vision far 
down the reaches of the infinite, speak in language 
that the common plodder cannot apprehend, and 
which to the untutored mind seems unintelligible 
and meaningless. 

But would we reach up and grasp the stars, bal- 
ance the worlds of matter in the scales of judg- 
ment, trace the everlasting trend of impalpable 
forces, and discern the thread of reason in the fab- 
ric of existence, we must abide where dwells the 
philosopher, who, with large comprehension and 
rational analysis, assembles and compares the con- 
geries of events that constitute the completeness 
of the vast Existent. 

With him our culture widens beyond the nar- 
row compass of the mere student of phenomena, 
who connotes not the universal meaning, but 
studies nature only in her visible and variant 
forms. A strange flower to the botanist is of rare 
and gratifying value, for it gives him occasion 
for the analysis of its several parts and its proper 
classification in the herbaria of nature. Carefully 
does he survey its petalled corolla, its stamen and 
calyx, note its configuration, observe its distin- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 251 

guishing features, and at length with great glee, 
determine to what class, order, species and family 
it may belong, rejoicing that he has stolen a se- 
cret from nature, and achieved a scientific tri- 
umph. 

But not with such restricted contemplation does 
the philosopher gaze upon the humble flower at 
his feet. To him there is woven within the web 
of that simple life all the forces that penetrate the 
boundless infinite, so that it conveys to him the 
light of the sun in its resplendent hues ; its chemic 
essence reveals to him the unity of the constituent 
universe; its fragrance is the palpitation of the 
circumambient air that effects not alone his senses, 
but penetrates the outermost regions of sympa- 
thetic nature ; and its bowing welcome, in the blow- 
ing wind, speaks to him of the common bond of 
fellowship that holds all things together and as 
one in the immensity of space. The flowers, — as 
well as every other fact or feature of nature, — 
are then to him not discrete forms of matter 
which he needs must contemplate with a cold and 
distant eye ; but each single specimen becomes his 
companion, friend and fellow, that whispers to his 
soul the cryptic secret of the natural world. 



252 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Close of kin with the contemplative philosopher 
stands the poet, discerner of the immanent wisdom 
of nature, and magician of language, who with 
the witchery of words weaves a world of his own, 
peopled with figments of the mind and fairies of 
the imagination. The poet lives most near to na- 
ture, for his heart, like the Aeolian harp, re- 
sponds to the slightest touch of impalpable forces. 
Oft he knows not what he sings, for his lyre is 
swept by unseen hands and his lips respond with 
spontaneous speech. He dwells upon vertiginious 
heights, where flitting clouds wrap their fleecy 
mantle round his form, and lingering sunsets 
pause to paint his coronet upon the westering 
skies. The heavens are his only canopy, and 
they oft vanish into impalpable nothingness, as 
his far seeing eye penetrates the infinite. 

Time waits not for him nor he for time. He 
sweeps in consciousness beyond all limitation, and 
balances his feet on the horizon of eternity. The 
vast and ever present now embosoms him, and like 
a body in a vacuum he floats light as the airless 
void that holds him. His feet walk not the earth, 
nor yet do his hands touch the stars. He is be- 
yond approachable substance; to him all forms 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 253 

are but vanishing visions, the wandering phan- 
toms of an endless dream, — strange and flitting 
visitants from a world of fancy and imagination. 
Like bubbles that burst in air, when thin and ra- 
diant with glory, the things to him most beautiful 
are the most evanescent ; for they are but the fra- 
gile forms of flitting fancy, shattered in an in- 
stant by cold, obtrusive reason. He cannot gaze 
long upon his figured phantasies. They are shy 
and coy, timid and smote with fear. Like curious 
children, they will aproach and look deep down 
into his soul with wonder and amazement, but soon 
as discovered and embraced they shrink and van- 
ish from his presence. 

The poet utters not the language of the clod, 
but the voicings of the wind. He speaks not with 
heavy words that walk with feet of clay, but with 
airy syllables whose fluttering wings disport un- 
wonted colorings in their flight. To him the 
commonplaces of the world are not stale, flat and 
unprofitable ; for he sees them with other eyes than 
ours and detects therein such unsuspected force 
and sentiment, as none but he imagines. 

To every man, for instance, the rising an<3 the 
setting of the sun is so ordinary that only on un- 



254 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

usual appearances does it awaken extraordinary 
appreciation. Among most men such scenes are 
spoken of in simple language without hidden 
meaning or suggestive sentiment. But not so the 
poet. To him the dim appearance of the dawn 
bespeaks a spiritual significance — the vague per- 
sonification of an idea. As thus: 

" But look, the morn in russet clad, 
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill." 

Or thus : 

" Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." 

Such language to the untutored rustic is jar- 
gon and absurd. He cannot understand how the 
morn can walk, or clothe itself with a mantle, nor 
has he ever witnessed other candles than those of 
tallow, nor seen the toes of day, jocund or other- 
wise, and can but little imagine how they can 
stand upon the misty mountain tops. To under- 
stand the poet the mind must have room for simi- 
les, startling contrasts, and anthropomorphic 
myth. 

He who seeks to restrain the poet to the ordi- 
nary and natural meaning of his words soon 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 255 

learns that for him the poet has no meaning at 
all. He is reckless of common sentiment, and 
knows but little of the language of the streets. 
To walk with him one must wear such high-heeled 
boots his strides shall measure seventy times seven 
leagues, and continents become as mole-hills. One 
must not hope to capture the poet by clipping his 
wings. If the poet descend to earth his inspira- 
tion vanishes and he is like one of us. 

The gods must ever remain on Olympus ; genius 
must not descend from Parnassus ; familiarity 
breeds contempt. Once we undeify them and dis- 
close their mere humanity, they cease to be objects 
of worship, and become the butt of ridicule, the 
target of embittered scorn. To find the poet you 
must lose the man. He lives in other worlds than 
ours ; and should we seek him in his haunts, his 
splendor would bedim our vision and dethrone our 
reason. His is a world himself has made, and 
such as only its creators can enjoy. For mortals 
of the common clay such lofty heights and dia- 
phanous air unsettle the senses and emasculate 
the mind. 

We never know how ignorant we are till we 
enter the company of the poets. All things that 



THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 



heretofore we knew become as strangers bewilder- 
ing us with their unwonted robes. We hear him us- 
ing our accustomed words but set in such strange 
company and comport, they appear as different 
as the stone the lapidary sets, from what it was 
before his magic art adorned it. For whatsoe'er 
the poet sees is overcast with sheen of golden mist, 
describing which he must needs use such golden 
words as fit the golden thought. He sings not 
what he sees but what he feels ; not what the eye 
discerns but what the heart explores. His intui- 
tions are his deities whose voicings are his inspi- 
ration. They furnish him the breastplate of de- 
fense, the armor of defiance and the sword of 
truth. With these he ventures forth the conse- 
crated Knight, to fight the battles of his mistress, 
Love, nor falters till his lance is broken, and even 
then retreats but to sally forth again newly ar- 
mored for the fray. For, 

" The poet in a golden clime was born, 
With golden stars above; 
Dower'd with hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of Love. 

"And bravely furnish'd all abroad to fling 
The winged shafts of truth, 



EDWARD H. SOTHERN AS HAMLET 

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce 
it to you. Act III, Sc. II. 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 257 

To throng with stately blooms the breathing 
spring 
Of hope and youth." 

Hence the study of the poets is not vain and 
worthless. It is not to listen merely to the raptu- 
rous strains of melody that please the ear ; nor to 
pursue the trackless wanderings of his created fig- 
ments. The poet lives, 'tis true, in dreams ; his 
scenes and characters are all but airy nothings; 
his story is unvarnished fiction; his motif trans- 
cendental and ideal. His feet rest not long 
enough upon the earth for him so to acquaint him- 
self with human forms that he can distinguish be- 
tween the mundane and celestial, between what is 
of the earth earthy and what but gauzy spirit. 

Nevertheless his prophecy is irrevocable; his 
utterances are the very heart of truth. Poets 
have ever sung the truth before purblind philoso- 
phers discerned it. Statesmen and pedagogues 
must resort to the poet's haunts ere their conclu- 
sions can be trusted; to hear what say the gods 
before the halting speech of man is ventured. In 
the great crises of the world the poets have ever 
led the heroes of action ; they are the forerunners 
of achievement. 



258 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Among the poets we find many surprising il- 
lustrations of this fact. Edmund Spenser, the 
great poet of the 16th century, composed a satire 
on the rising socialism of his day, and in a re- 
markable drama foretold the disapointment that 
would befall those who dreamed of human equal- 
ity. He portrays a great giant come to earth who 
promises to readjust the relations that exist be- 
tween men, so that none would have but his right- 
ful share and none more than the other. 

" Therefore the vulgar did about him flock, 
And cluster thick about his leasings vain, 
Like foolish flies about a honey-cock, 
In hope by him, great benefit to gain, 
And uncontrolled freedom to obtain." 

Of course he shows how universal disappoint- 
ment and dismay followed these glittering prom- 
ises, and almost two centuries before the French 
Revolution foretold how the end would be futile. 

" Like as a ship whom cruel tempest drives 
Upon a rock with horrible dismay, 
Her shattered ribs in thousand pieces rives, 
And, spoiling all her gears and goodly ray, 
Does make herself misfortune's piteous prey; 
So down the Cliff the wretched Giant tumbled; 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 259 



His battered balances in pieces lay, 

His timbered bones all broken, rudely rumbled; — 

So was the high-aspiring with huge ruin humbled." 

"In old Rome and Greece the Poet was re- 
garded as a species of Prophet and called by the 
same name ; both were held alike divinely inspired ; 
but there are not many unveilings of the distant 
future in poetry so remarkable as this anticipation 
and ref atution of the Liberty and Equality philo- 
sophism of the eighteenth century in the end of 
the sixteenth," says an able commentator referring 
to Spenser's "Faery Queen," from which I have 
quoted. And yet this example is not altogether 
unique ; for because of the poet's spiritual pre- 
vision he is by instinct prophetic in his utterance. 

Every great epoch of human history engenders 
its swarm of inspiring singers whose prophesies 
forestall the swelling tides of action. Like as the 
morning songsters assemble to waken and welcome 
the golden sun, rising in the roseate dawn, and 
will not rest till he has cast his radiant beams 
athwart the horizon, so have ever the poets been 
thrilled with prophetic emotion by the intima- 
tion of approaching upheavals in human prog- 
ress, nor stilled their voices till hope was swal- 



260 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

lowed up in victory. Who shall ever say how 
much the songful tunes of the poets have urged 
humanity to achievement along the higher grades 
of life? Who shall deny that when mankind has 
sometimes been on the verge of degeneracy, when 
the sublimer intimations of the spirit had been 
dimmed by the gross ambitions of the baser self, 
the cry of the poet has often awakened them and 
stirred their hearts to higher things ! How often 
has the poet roused the flames of patriotism in the 
human heart, to fight alas ! sometimes for ven- 
geance and crass conquest, but more often for jus- 
tice, right and truth ! How often has he foreseen 

" The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of 
fire" 

and called to those of dull eye who could not see 
that 

" It is better to fight for the good than to rail at 
the ill;" 

till they were roused from their lethargy, and the 
hosts of right wrested, from "the deathful-grin- 
ning mouths of the fortress" of wrong, their 
weapons of defence! How shall we ever know 
how deeply these tender words of dear Bobby 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 261 

Burns sank into the human breast and found ex- 
pression in the later Industrial Revolution that 
swept the English Isles and forestalled the glories 
of our own democracy? 

" See yonder poor, o'erlabor'd wight, 

So abject, mean and vile, 
Who begs a brother of the earth 

To give him leave to toil; 
And see his lordly fellow-worm 

The poor petition spurn, 
Unmindful, though a weeping wife 

And helpless offspring mourn ! " 

And these words are even to-day a picture of 
the wants and wrongs of our age and still inspire 
humane and philanthropic hearts to agitate for 
justice to mankind. 

Thus we find in all ages poets have ever been 
the forerunners and inspirers of human action, 
reformation and achievement. 

However, most poets have been able to round 
out for themselves but a single sphere of action; 
their sympathies have been circumscribed within 
the limits of narrow fellowship or national bias ; 
they have seen the outer world from their own 
limited experiences and tragic lives; and while 



262 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

they have touched all hearts more or less because 
of the native kinship of human souls and the simi- 
larity of human passions, yet but few have lost 
themselves in the universal soul of humanity and 
imaged forth the infinite variety of human char- 
acter. 

It may be truly said without exaggeration that 
but one poet in all the world, whatever time or 
clime we contemplate, has attained to so high a 
spiritual and intellectual promontory in the ascent 
of his genius, that he alone is the cynosure of cen- 
turies — the observed of all observers. We cannot 
imagine a period in the world's history when the 
sentiments, if not the language, of Shakespeare 
would not find a lodging place in the human 
heart. Like Paul in religion, he in literature is 
all things to all men. He is so cosmopolitan in 
thought that no place, period or people exclu- 
sively can claim him. 

He is so universal in individual experience and 
character, that he speaks as naturally the words 
of the loftiest as of the base, the concepts of the 
philosopher as the f alterings of the fool. He can 
rave with the thunders of the titan or charm with 
the lispings of the cooing babe. He has so com- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 263 

pletely run the gamut of all human passions, pur- 
poses and proclivities, that it seems impossible to 
conceive a character which he has not foreseen. 
With a single sweep of his pen Shakespeare fur- 
nishes the mind with a whole gallery of art. To 
read him is not merely to read rare and meaning- 
ful words, but to have one's mind suddenly filled 
with a wild and gorgeous tangle of flowers, inter- 
lacing shrubbery, variously tinted plants and a 
thousand unnameable growths, indigenous to him 
alone. He seldom speaks in direct and simple 
language. He utters every thought in simile 
and metaphor; casting on the mind not the mere 
form of words, but picturesque and unwonted 
images. 

Shakespeare does not write, he paints ; he does 
not speak, he sings ; he does not converse, he 
orates. His moods are always extreme, his lan- 
guage ever vehement and fraught with passion. 
In the opening scene of the Merchant of Venice, 
where Salarino, Salanio and Antonio converse, 
mark the interplay of imaginary pictures that 
pass indifferently between them as if their words 
were the most commonplace. Salanio taunting 
Antonio reminds him that had he "such a venture 
forth" as has Antonio 



264 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

"He would be still 
Plucking the grass, to know where sits the wind, 
Peering in maps for ports, and piers and roads," 

and so on, when Salarino seizing the thought con- 
tinues it with this extravagant imagery : — 

" My wind cooling my broth 
Would blow me into an ague, when I thought 
What harm a wind too great might do at sea. 
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run, 
But I should think of shallows and of flats, 
And see my wealthy Andrew docked in sand, 
Veiling her high top lower than her ribs, 
To kiss her burial. Should I go to church, 
And see the holy edifice of stone, 
And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks, 
Which, touching but my gentle vessel's side, 
Would scatter all her spices on the stream, 
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks, 
And in a word, but even now worth this, 
And now worth nothing." 

In this one passage we find more than a dozen 
mental pictures thrown in by way of illustrating 
the ordinary idea that where one deals much with 
the ocean and ventures to traffic with far countries 
over the seas he must needs be constantly anxious 
as to his material welfare. 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 265 

It matters but little to this spontaneous poet 
how common and monotonous be the experiences 
he may be describing, he sees them so differently 
than others do, that when they have been pictured 
by his pen we needs must feel thattfefly are not 
what we had previously thought them. 

Take this thought, that sometimes Ambition 
will rouse one of humble spirit to such achieve- 
ment as to convert him from humility to overbear- 
ing egotism. But now when Shakespeare says it 
on the tongue of Brutus see how altogether differ- 
ent it sounds: 

" 'Tis a common proof 
That lowliness is young Ambition's ladder, 
Whereto the climber-upwards turns his face; 
But when he once attains the upmost round, 
He then unto the ladder turns his back, 
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees 
By which he did ascend." 

But of what advantage it may be asked is it to 
the ordinary man to read such language, or as 
some would say such circulocution, such redund- 
ancy ? 

First of all, the advantage lies in the broaden- 
ing of the mind's horizon. For, language is the 



266 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

symbol of mental growth, — the vehicle of thought 
— and where the vocabulary is limited and con- 
fined, the state of the mind is likewise. Shakes- 
peare has the most complete and extensive vocabu- 
lary of any writer in the English language. 
Therefore his information is the most extensive 
and various of any one mind in all our history. 
Knowledge seemed to have come to him intuitively. 
But knowledge came on the wings of words, and it 
was because of his fluent mind which lent fluency 
to his language, that his information became so 
comprehensive and extensive. A vast vocabulary 
need be feared by none. All one need fear who is 
possessed of many words is that he be devoid of 
judgment. Outwardly, the only difference to be 
detected between a fool and a philosopher is that 
the philosopher knows how to use the words con- 
sistently, which the fool uses incoherently. It is 
not the fool's vocabulary that interferes with his 
logic, but his want of logic that trips up his vo- 
cabulary. 

By way of illustration of this point let us con- 
trast a soliloquy of Launcelot Gobbo with one of 
Hamlet's. In the soliloquies I am about to quote 
it will be observed that the theme is the authority 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 267 

and regnancy of conscience. In both cases it is 
shown that conscience makes cowards of those who 
pause to enquire of its oracles when the impulse 
of the heart prompts to some important but dan- 
gerous venture. In the one case the fool speaks, 
in the other the philosopher. Thus Launcelot 
Gobbo: 

"Certainly, my conscience will serve me to run 
away from this Jew my master. The fiend is at 
my elbow and tempts me, saying to me, 'Gobbo, 
Launcelot Gobbo, good Launcelot,' or 'Good 
Gobbo,' or 'Good Launcelot Gobbo, use your legs, 
take the start, run away.' My Conscience says, 
'No, take heed, honest Launcelot,' or as aforesaid, 
'honest Launcelot Gobbo ; do not run ; scorn run- 
ning with thy heels.' Well, the most courageous 
fiend bids me pack: 'Via,' says the fiend, 'away' 
says the fiend ; 'for heaven's sake rouse up a brave 
mind,' says the fiend, 'and run.' Well, my Con- 
science hanging about the neck of my heart, says 
very wisely to me, 'My honest friend Launcelot, 
being an honest man's son' — or rather an honest 
woman's son — well, my Conscience says 'Launce- 
lot, budge not.' 'Budge !' says the fiend. 'Budge 
not' says my conscience. 'Conscience' say I, 'you 



268 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

counsel well;' 'Fiend,' say I, 'you counsel well. 
To be ruled by my conscience I should stay with 
the Jew my master, who God bless the mark, is a 
kind of devil; and, to run away from the Jew, I 
should be ruled by the fiend, who, saving your 
reverence, is the devil himself. Certainly the Jew 
is the very devil incarnation ; and, in my con- 
science, my conscience is a kind of hard con- 
science, to offer to counsel me to stay with the 
Jew. The fiend gives the more friendly counsel. 
I will run fiend; my heels are at your command- 
ment; I will run." 

Here we find all the marks of the fool: garru- 
lousness, circumlocution, indecisiveness, uncon- 
scious humor, paucity of ideas accompanied with 
frequent repetition, and quivering vacillation. It 
is an absurd speech for a wise man to make, but a 
wise speech for a fool to utter. That is, if 
Shakespeare had put wise language into the 
mouth of the fool he would have destroyed his 
fool and made him a philosopher. But while, in 
point of fact, his fool is discussing a most philoso- 
phical problem, he discusses it, thanks to Shakes- 
peare, as a fool and not as a philosopher. It is 
in such touches as this, revealing his intuitive un- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 269 

derstanding of human nature, that Shakespeare 
discloses his genius. Now we will hear him dis- 
cuss this same problem through the lips of one of 
the profoundest philosophers in all literature, 
whom he himself has created — the sad and melan- 
choly Dane. 

" To be or not to be — that is the question ; — 
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or, to take up arms against a sea of troubles, 
And by opposing end them ? . . . . 

Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscovered country from whose bourn 
No traveller returns, puzzles the will, 
And makes us rather bear the ills we have 
Than fly to others that we know not of? 
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all; 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action." 

Thus in each character of Shakespeare's the 
thought consistently expresses the natural mental 



270 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

mode. They are all so clean cut and perfectly 
carved that we would recognize them in the street 
should we confront them. It is true these charac- 
ters do not speak the language we use, and they 
all employ what we would today call a stilted and 
exaggerated phraseology. But that is because 
in the first place the language is that of the Eliza- 
bethan days of English literature and in the sec- 
ond place it is cast in the mould of blank verse. 
This verse forces a fullness, and sometimes even 
a redundancy of expression. There are many 
passages in Shakespeare which are almost incom- 
prehensible because the idea is threshed over so 
many times in the same sentence, and in such con- 
fusing variety as to dim instead of clarify the per- 
ception of the reader. As for instance this pas- 
sage in Hamlet, where he is discussing the acci- 
dents of birth that sometimes cause innocent peo- 
ple to suffer on account of a single weakness which 
foils otherwise an altogether noble character. 

" So, oft it chances in particular men, 
That for some vicious mole of nature in them, 
As, in their birth — wherein they are not guilty, 
Since nature cannot choose his origin — 
By the overgrowth of some complexion, 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 271 

Oft breaking down the pales and fortes of reason, 
Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens 
The form of plausive manners, that these men, 
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, 
Being nature's livery, or fortune's star, — 
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace, 
As infinite as man may undergo — 
Shall in the general censure take corruption 
From that particular fault." 

Now that is certainly a very long-drawn-out, 
much confused and involved sentence, to state the 
simple truth that men's natures are largely com- 
plexioned by heredity, or that one weak spot in 
the foundation sometimes causes the entire struc- 
ture to crumble. While this seems to be a fault in 
style, that would prove positively fatal to any imi- 
tator, in Shakespeare it seems to be almost a vir- 
tue, because it forces the student to attentive ap- 
plication, while he seeks to unravel the imagery 
and discover the concealed thought. Indeed the 
rumbling words of Shakespeare, even though they 
themselves seem senseless, take on such exquisite 
form and melody, that one must love them for the 
very sound. 

Who can question that the study of such a mas- 
ter of language is itself a liberal education ? But 



272 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

when we couple with this that he touches every 
phase and fact of human life, almost all the chief 
events of history, almost every quality of indi- 
vidual character; that there is no problem of 
philosophy which he passes by without discussion, 
scarcely an occupation of man on which he does 
not dilate, or a science with which he is unac- 
quainted, a system or ceremony of religion, a sym- 
bol of mythology or an arcane deliverance of mys- 
ticism, of which he does not reveal at least some 
knowledge; we appreciate the vast extent of his 
information, which with such diligence and elo- 
quence he imparts to his readers. 

In Shakespeare's plays we learn the value of all 
the cardinal virtues : Kindness, Humanity, Friend- 
ship, the policy of Honesty, the power of Truth. 
We learn the vanity of Ambition, Pride and 
Envy, the baseness of Ingratitude, the hollowness 
of Selfishness, the vileness of Calumny, the mock- 
ery of the Hypocrite's role, the poison of Jeal- 
ousy, the wantonness and waste of vain Indul- 
gence. He is the profoundest of philosophers 
and the solemnest of preachers ; he is the most far- 
reaching and prophetic of statesmen, the soberest 
ruler of nations and the sanest guide of individu- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 273 

als He teaches the loftiest morals by presenting 
the noblest exemplars of character, and, by con- 
trast, the hollovmess and worthlessness of ignoble 
and dishonorable lives. And yet he presents all 
sides and phases of life and thought, giving us 
the whole panorama of human existence without 
malice or attenuation. 

To know Shakespeare you must know life ; and 
if you are ignorant of life, after you have read 
Shakespeare you shall indeed know it. If you 
had experienced a thousand lives you could have 
learned but little more than this magician of the 
mind could teach. Not that he instructs you pur- 
posely and by rote as in a text book. But he 
teaches by innuendo, by the incarnation of an 
idea in a character, by the motif of a play, by 
simile, metaphor, comparison and contrast. In 
the story of Macbeth you have the whole philo- 
sophy of Occultism, all its dangers, its degenerate 
influence on the mind and soul of its blind follow- 
ers, as well as the gross superstition that it incul- 
cates. 

In Hamlet you have a treatise of philosophical 
skepticism, the wreck of a mind thrust by cruel 
fate upon a venture that overthrows all its posi- 



274 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

tiveness and optimism, and turns the world into a 
cavern of insane broodings and despairing mel- 
ancholy. In Richard III. you have the portrayal 
of the enormity of self-seeking ambition and the 
utter worthlessness of religion founded on pre- 
tense and hypocrisy. In Lear you have the mis- 
fortune of a father's misplaced devotion, the out- 
rage and criminality of ingratitude, and the de- 
thronement of reason from a mind supported by a 
heart too ardent and trustful of its fellow men. 
You have, too a mind made mad by egomania. 
Lear is not all to be pitied, for he was himself his 
own worst enemy. 

But while, as I have said, Shakespeare is in- 
directly the greatest of all preachers and teachers, 
he is such the most unconsciously of all men. The 
last thought, doubtless, that entered the mind of 
this great creator, was that of posing as an in- 
structor of mankind, as a teacher of morals, as an 
expounder of religion or philosophy. Neverthe- 
less he achieves the same result although he appar- 
ently aims at nothing of the kind. He is an 
artist, a portrait painter, a perfect and most skil- 
ful sculptor. He reproduces the world that he 
finds without any thought of attempting to make 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 275 

it any better or any worse. But we who read our 
lessons into the magic creations of this master 
draw, if we are wise, the prof oundest conclusions 
to our advantage. 

While Shakespeare portrays for us the noblest 
characters he can find in the empyrean of his im- 
agination, he does not hesitate to portray also 
the meanest, most abject and detestable. His is 
a world full of variety and contrast. He empha- 
sizes the beauty and ugliness of character by pre- 
senting the opposites in contrasts so strong both 
are exaggerated by way of illustration. He throws 
just as much genius into the creation of a most 
detestable and monstrous character as into that of 
the most noble and sublime. His genius toils no 
more for the production of a Prospero, the very 
idealization of human and divine nobility, than 
for that of a Caliban, the basest and most offen- 
sive of bestial humanity. And yet, withal, in the 
mere depictment of those two characters he 
preaches the tremendous truth that the force of 
mental energy and clarity of thought will always 
overpower and control mere muscular capacity 
and mental stupidity. Hear what says Prospero : 



276 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

PROSPERO 

Abhorred slave. 
Which any print of goodness wilt not take, 
Being capable of all ill. I pitying thee, 
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each 

hour 
One thing or other: 

CALIBAN 

You taught me language; and my profit on't 

Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you 

For learning me your language. 

PROSPERO 

Hag-seed hence, 
Fetch us in fuel; and be quick, thou'rt best 
To answer other business. 
If thou neglect' st, or dost unwillingly 
What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps, 
Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar, 
That beasts shall tremble at thy din. 

Here we discern the play of the high art of 
mental power displayed over vulgar muscle and 
physical fear. Who does not the more honor, and 
wish to emulate, Prospero, the more bestial and 
foul the base Caliban by contrast seems? Thus 
Shakespeare preaches by the majesty as well as 
the ignominy of his characters, his only purpose 
being, however, to be true to nature and to fact. 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 277 

But different than most of his contemporaries 
or predecessors our great master depicts every 
phase of life, the high and low alike, the plebeian 
as impartially as the patrician, the statesman no 
more keenly than the clown, the menial as per- 
fectly and as truly as the master or the ruler. He 
does not select from the wilderness of human char- 
acters only a few noble and exemplary ones, that 
they may live with lasting and unchallenged im- 
pression in our minds. On the contrary, artist 
of the whole of humanity, he takes each and every 
character he meets, whether beautiful or ugly, fas- 
cinating or repulsive, worthy or detestable. More 
than that he was one of the first, if indeed, not the 
very first, of all great literary artists, who re- 
fused to confine his observations and creations 
merely to the dynasty of social aristocrats or the 
realm of culture and respectability. Like our mod- 
ern Dickens he found as much if not more interest 
in the characters of low degree, in artisans, toil- 
ers, grave diggers, cobblers, masons, rustics and 
uncouth plodders. 

Nor should the virtue of Shakespeare as the 
poetic historian be forgotten. The general 
reader who is put to sleep by the prosy narratives 



278 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

of customary historians must find in the luxurious 
rhetoric of the Elizabethan genius much to whet 
the appetite and spur the desire for historic in- 
formation. Beginning with the twelfth century, 
that epochal period of English history when the 
secular institutions were inaugurating their sev- 
erance from subserviency to the ecclesiastical, in 
the reign of King John, he carries the entranced 
reader through the passionate period of the Ref- 
ormation to the very advent of Elizabeth, trans- 
porting him with such abounding imagery and 
fanciful scenery that he full forgets he is perus- 
ing the dull facts of history — the veritable 
chronicles of the times. 

However, the effect of the Shakespearean his- 
torical narratives is not to inform the reader of 
the actual facts, but to permit him so to enjoy 
the poetic glosses that his appetite for verity 
may be the more keenly whetted. He would in- 
deed be most deceived who looked to Shakespeare 
for veritable chronicle. Yet while the body of 
the fact is so clothed with fantastic habiliment 
that it is well disguised, still the body exists, the 
frame work of truth abides. Indeed in this very 
grace the genius of Shakespeare most excelled. 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 279 

Precisely as when he copied the story and the 
actual arrangement of the tragedy of Hamlet 
from Belief o rest's, yet created a drama so wholly 
original because it was clothed with the glory and 
charm of Shakespeare's golden diction and inim- 
itable imagery ; so when he recites historical 
facts, while truth is there, yet it is so beclothed 
with dazzling garments that but its bare outline 
can be discerned. This splendid grace of genius 
is at once detected in his first historical venture, 
the drama of King John. There will always be 
those of such Nestorian countenance that they 
must needs witness naught but verity in every 
historial assertion. Such visages cannot be made 
to smile at the witticism of poetic gloss or the 
suggestive concealment of the figure by the mod- 
ish garments that contain it. Thus there will 
ever be sour-vis aged essayists who will ask with 
glowering sternness, "What were Shakespeare's 
authorities for his history, and how far has he 
departed from them? And may the plays be 
given to our youth as properly historical?" The 
superlative humor of such unconsciously clownish 
critics is a curious revelation of the dulness of 
even the cultured mind in discerning the illusive 



280 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

spirit of poesy. Shakespeare is, of course, al- 
ways the poet ; never the mere narrator. The 
prosy chronicler gives the facts, and shudders at 
fancy ; the poet is bent on fancy first, and fact 
after. Yet the chronicler dulls the fact by the 
absence of wit by so much as the poet illumines it 
by the wit the chronicler contemns. 

Against such realistic criticism A. W. Schlegel 
has well said: "The principal traits (in Shake- 
speare's historical plays) are given with so much 
correctness, their apparent, causes and their secret 
motives are given with so much penetration, that 
we may therein study history, so to speak, after 
nature, without fearing that such lively images 
should ever be effaced from our mind." The mis- 
fortune with all prosaic critics is that they can- 
not discern the idealism that clothes the cruder 
thought. Were Shakespeare less a poet he would 
have been the less a historian; for he shows how 
historical events may be so cast in poetic imagery 
as to impress them indelibly on the mind, while 
the words of the mere chronicler soon dissolve in 
oblivion. Were one to read an ordinary histo- 
rian's description of the famous fleet which Eng- 
land sent out against Spain in 1596 under Essex 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 281 



and Lord Howard, described as "1000 gentlemen 
volunteers, 6,368 troops, 6,772 seamen, exclusive 
of the Dutch, besides one hundred fifty sail, the 
navy royal, men of war, store-ships, the rest 
being pinnacers, vituallers, transports," etc., in 
Southey's words, how little would one find here to 
stir the interest or rouse the memory. But when 
described by Shakespeare, as some believe, in the 
words of Chatillon to King Philip in the second 
act of "King John," how does the imagery seize 
us as the splendor of a gorgeous landscape : 

"England, impatient of your just demands, 
Hath put himself in arms; the adverse winds, 
Whose leisure I have staid, have given him time 
To land his legions all as soon as I: — 
. . . All the unsettled humours of the land — 
Rash, inconsiderate, fiery, voluntaries, 
With ladies' faces and fierce dragons' spleens, 
Have sold their fortunes at their native homes, 
Bearing their birthrights proudly on their backs, 
To make a hazard of new fortunes here. 
In brief, a braver choice of dauntless spirits, 
Than now the English bottoms have waft o'er, 
Did never float upon the swelling tide, 
To do offence and scath in Christendom." 

Each line is an- historical etching, each word is 



282 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

fraught with veritable meaning. Shakespeare 
drives the student to his books ; the listener he 
pleases with his words. 

Studying the play of King John affords us an 
ample interpretation of the relation to actual his- 
tory which Shakespeare cultivates in all the ten 
so-called "historical" plays. The first feature to 
be noted is that he does not resort primarily to 
standard historical works for his events, but to 
a wholly different source. It must not be for- 
gotten that he is always first the playwright and 
the historian second. Therefore he clings closely 
to the stage traditions of his age. Now each of 
the plays has a stage precedent or a series of 
stage precedents. "The King John of Shake- 
speare is not the King John of the historians 
which Shakespeare had unquestionably studied; 
it is not the King John of his own imagination, 
casting off the trammels which a rigid adoption 
of the facts of those historians would have im- 
posed upon him; but it is the King John, in the 
conduct of the story, in the juxta-position of the 
characters, and in the catastrophe, — in the histor- 
ical truth, and in the historical error, — of the 
play which preceded him some few years." The 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 283 

history of John had been familiar to theatrical 
audiences for about a half century. "Shake- 
speare had to choose between the forty years of 
stage tradition and the employment of new ma- 
terials." But this very transfusion of new life, 
intellectuality, spiritual illumination and rhetori- 
cal grace into the dull veins of the old traditional 
drama is the supreme evidence of Shakespeare's 
unparalleled genius. 

To read, by way of comparison for instance, 
the old play of Bale, called "The Pageant of 
Kynge Johan," is at once a disappointment and 
a revelation. It is a disappointment to see how 
utterly dull a prosaist makes a thrilling historical 
epoch; and a revelation to observe how magically 
the genius of Shakespeare transmutes the leaden 
dullness of the old play into the golden brilliance 
of his own. 

Before quitting this phase of our study we 
must emphasize one more Shakespearean charac- 
teristic which is all too much forgotten. It is 
customary among those who are squeamish as to 
literary purity and intellectual morality to com- 
plain of much of the Shakespearean diction as 
being unqualified for parlour acquaintance and 



284 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

offensive to the refined taste of modernity. We 
have often been reminded of the apology for the 
Shakespearean latitude in colloquial vulgarity 
by the fact that it was the custom of his age to 
indulge in such extravagances without doing of- 
fence to even the most delicate taste of his times. 
We have, perhaps, however, not sufficiently em- 
phasised the fact that in this very particular 
Shakespeare was a genuine reformer, and because 
of the instinct of his native refinement, superior to 
the age in which he wrote, he set a standard far 
above that of his literary compeers. 

This is especially evidenced in the play of Bale 
to which we have just referred, as it was the most 
popular and recent of the King John dramas of 
Shakespeare's time. Indeed it was the precise 
pattern which Shakespeare used for the modelling 
of his play. Yet Bale's work is surcharged with 
utterly unspeakable vulgarisms, unrepeatable ri- 
baldries, nauseating insinuations. "A vocab- 
ulary of choice terms of abuse, familiarly used 
in the times of the Reformation, might be con- 
structed out of this performance." 

While Shakespeare was not a purist by pro- 
fesson, he manifestly enjoyed instinctive sensi- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 285 

bilities far more refined than the respectable gen- 
try of his age. Indeed in nothing do we better 
discern the ultra divergence in manners between 
his time and our own than by the language he 
puts in the mouths of his characters. Much that 
they say, the words of FalstafF, Trinculo, Cade, 
Caliban, and many of the women characters, can- 
not be repeated in polite society today. But 
when we recall that it was polite in Shakespeare's 
day to use language, as evidenced by Bale, of so 
base and repulsive a nature, so unspeakably of- 
fensive that no modern book would be permitted 
to contain them, we may well imagine how seri- 
ous and far reaching a reform in this regard 
Shakespeare instituted in his work. 

Quoting J. A. Symonds, we may grasp a 
vivid picture of the period whose social customs 
Shakespeare so unconsciously modified, if indeed 
he did not reform: "What distinguished the Eng- 
lish at this epoch from the nations of the South 
was not refinement of manners, sobriety or self- 
control. On the contrary they retained an unen- 
viable character for more than ordinary savag- 
ery. » . . Erasmus describes the filth of their 
houses, and the sickness engendered in their cities 



286 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

by bad ventilation. . . . Men and women who 
read Plato or discussed the elegancies of Pe- 
trarch, suffered brutal practical jokes, relished 
the obscenities of jesters, used the grossest lan- 
guage of the people. Carrying farms and acres 
on their backs in the shape of costly silks and 
laces, they lay upon rushes filthy with the vomit 
of old banquets." 

It was in such an age that Shakespeare intro- 
duced the tenderness of Imogen, the purity of 
Portia, the virtue of Desdemona, the innocence of 
Miranda, the unpolluted abandon of Rosalind, 
and the misguided folly of Jessica. It was in an 
age of deceit, savagery, ribaldry and cunning 
that he exposed the hypocrisy of Richard, ex- 
alted the honesty of Othello, honored the faith- 
fulness of Romeo, and bared the vice of the 
bloody ambition of Macbeth. 

Thus may we discern the dark moral and social 
background of his age against which Shakespeare 
— the poet historian — spread the shafts of light 
that glowed in the heaven of his imagination. 
So replete with lofty idealism is his every 
thought and word that even when lisped on the 
vulgar tongue of his times it is not smirched or 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 287 

fouled. He cast his myriad jewels in an age of 
mire which only after ages more refined discov- 
ered and enjoyed. His virtue as an historian lies 
in this: He discerned with the prophetic eye of 
the poet the instinct of virtue that lay concealed 
in an age of vice. Out of the mine of his imagin- 
ation he acquired the rough ore which he so puri- 
fied it has become the fibre and substance of suc- 
ceeding civilizations. His history is at once 
poety, prophecy and prevision. 

The charge is, however, made by some that al- 
though this wonderful writer wrote sympatheti- 
cally with all manner of characters he was so 
much out of sympathy with the plebeian toiler that 
he pictured him in demeaning and ignoble colors. 
It is said that wherever Shakespeare refers to the 
artisan class he does so with the apparent purpose 
of exposing its offensive manners, its unreason and 
uncouthness. It is said that all his artisan char- 
acters are witless, feeble, the servile tools of their 
masters and but base and irredeemable underlings. 
See, for instance how Coriolanus raves and fumes 
at the common citizens who have deigned to criti- 
cise the government. 



288 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

CORIOLANUS 

What's the matter you dissensious rogues 
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion, 
Make yourselves scabs. 

FIRST CITIZEN 

We have ever your good word! 

CORIOLANUS 

He that will give good words to thee will flatter, 

Beneath abhorring. He that trusts to you, 

Where he should find you lions, finds you hares, 

Where foxes, geese; you are no surer, no, 

Than is the coal of fire upon the ice, 

Or hailstone in the sun. . . . Hang ye! 

With every minute you do change a mind, 

And call him noble that was now your hate, 

Him vile that was your garland. What's the matter 

That in these several places of the city 

You cry against the noble senate, who, 

Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else 

Would feed on one another. 

This sounds like most harsh and bitter lan- 
guage for a soldier to use against his fellow citi- 
zens, especially when he was pleading with them 
for office. It certainly presents a class of citizen- 
sliip most menial and servile. It is difficult for us 
toda} T to conceive of a mob so flaccid, cowed and 



FORBES ROBERTSON AS HAMLET 

Seems, madam, nay it is; 

I know not seems. Act I, Sc. I. 




THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 289 

enervate, as patiently to submit to such black- 
guardism and billingsgate. 

But does this fact lie as a charge against 
Shakespeare? Does it prove that his sympathies 
are only with the patrician class and that he uti- 
lizes every opportunity to abuse and defame the 
toiling classes in his plays? I think not. We 
must not forget that Shakespeare never intro- 
duces himself in his creations. He is absolutely 
impersonal, and gives himself as a sort of wax 
tablet on which are to be impressed the infinite 
varieties of human character and disposition. 
When his patricians speak, they utter the lan- 
guage of the times in which they are cast; when 
they act they expose the mannerisms of their age. 
So too with the meaner or so-called lower classes. 
The artist pictures them to us as they really were 
at the time he is painting. Who can doubt, who 
indeed does not know, that the mob was as he char- 
acterizes it in his Julius Caesar, and that the op- 
pressed and truckling toilers of the early legend- 
ary times of the Roman people, were truly char- 
acterized in Shakespeare's Coriolanus? 

Yet, the charge may be made that he seemed 
to prefer to depict only those times in which the 



290 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

masses were in a state of political dejection and 
social inferiority, ignoring better and nobler 
periods when the masses rose to superior condi- 
tions. We should remember however that Shakes- 
peare wrote in the sixteenth century, before the 
masses had begun to do much original thinking 
and while they were indeed in utmost subjection 
to the supposed higher strata of the social orders. 
One wonders, however, why he did not find in the 
noble deeds of the Roman Gracchi, and in the 
Agrarian uprising which they instigated, as much 
inspiration as he did in the socially degenerate 
days of Coriolanus. 

But, supreme genius though Shakespeare be, 
we should perhaps not expect from him more 
than human genius can attain. Even the loftiest 
of human minds must needs be somewhat circum- 
scribed by the mental atmosphere of their times. 
Notwithstanding that a true poet can see far be- 
yond his age, and often anticipate the events of 
the future by his spiritual discernment, he cannot 
wholly slough off the habilaments of his genera- 
tion and live unencumbered in some far-off time. 
Now, without a doubt Shakespeare associated 
much if not almost wholly with those who be- 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 291 



longed to the upper social strata of his time ; with 
courtiers, gallants, chivalrous suitors and spon- 
sors of the play-house. He mingled chiefly with 
the world of gaiety, pleasure seekers, the beau- 
monde. In his world the common people, the peas- 
ants, the rustic swain and the toilsome artisan, 
were regarded as beneath the consideration of a 
gentleman. What agitation, what sense of social 
revolution was rousing this submerged spirit, 
would scarcely be heard of at court, and if so 
would be laughed down with scorn and derision. 

We must not forget that Shakespeare seeks 
only to be true to, to give an exact copy of, the 
times of which he writes. Remember he wrote at 
least two centuries before the revival or let us say 
the birth of the spirit of humanity, when all man- 
kind began to think in lines of common interest 
and experience feelings of universal sympathy. 
As says Green the historian : "The England that 
is about us dates from the American War. It was 
then that the moral, the philanthropic, the reli- 
gious ideas which have moulded English society into 
its present shape first broke the spiritual torpor 
of the eighteenth century." 

Shakespeare pictures to us that old England, 



292 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

the England of brutal selfishness and abomina- 
tion. He writes of the England when the masses 
were held in abject subjection and absolute des- 
titution; when the lazy clergy appropriated the 
food of the poor and the rich lords stole their es- 
tates. But he takes the side neither of the rich 
nor the poor, neither of the freeholders of the 
realm nor their servile villains and serfs. He 
merely draws a picture of the times by showing 
the actual characters that complexioned it. 

When he depicts the Kentish insurrection under 
the famous if not infamous Jack Cade, he makes 
no plea either for or against him or his impover- 
ished followers. He shows Jack Cade as he was, 
a brutal, unconscionable, uncouth and murderous 
leader of the mob. But at the same time he shows 
by implication the cause of the insurrection in 
the condition of the unfortunate followers of this 
violent leader. 

When Jack Cade first enters on the stage, hav- 
ing assumed the false name of Lord Mortimer, 
striking his sword on London stones he exclaims : 

"Now is Mortimer lord of the city, and now 
sitting upon London stone we command that the 
waste conduit, the first year of our reign, shall 
run with red wine." 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 293 

Then to one of his cohorts, Dick, he exclaims: 
"Henceforth all things shall be in common, and 
in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass," utter- 
ing in a crude way the wild though vague hope of 
the oppressed peasants that they may sometime 
possess the benefits of the gentry. 

Shakespeare shows this Jack Cade, the rude 
leader of the peasant mob, as utterly illiterate 
and opposed to all culture and education. Thus, 
Cade taunts one Lord Say, who is brought in 
captive : 

"Come hither thou Say, thou buckram-lord, 
what answer canst thou make unto thy mightiness, 
that thou hast most traitorously erected a gram- 
mar-school, to infect the youth of the realm ; and 
against the king's crown and dignity, thou hast 
built up a paper mill; nay it will be said to thy 
face that thou keep'st men in thy house who daily 
read in books with red letters, and talk of a noun 
and a verb, and such abominable words as no 
Christian ear is able to endure it. And besides 
all this thou hast appointed certain justices of the 
peace in all the shires to hang honest men that 
steal for a living, and because they could not read 
thou hast hung them up ; only for which cause 
they were most worthy to live." 



294 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Now undoubtedly such portrayal of a peasant 
leader who instigated one of the earliest and most 
ineffectual of the revolutions in English history 
against the oppressions of the crown and enslave- 
ment to the lords and clergy, tends to remove from 
us all sympathy with him and inclines us to think 
that his revolt was not an insurrection against 
wrong, but simply an insurrection for plunder, 
violence and carnage. Shakespeare, however, is 
not responsible for this ; for he is accurately de- 
scribing Jack Cade, according to the historic 
records and chronicles. 

Hence, to say that Shakespeare has no kind 
or sympathetic word for the toiling masses, the 
oppressed peasantry, seems to me a needless 
charge, because he never entered into a cause 
either to sympathize with or oppose it, but merely 
to record and picture it in such a manner as mor- 
tal man has never yet been able to surpass. 

And yet how with but one stroke of the pen does 
he often reveal to us a whole volume of history, 
lift the veil of time far above the age which he is 
describing and afford us such vivid and compre- 
hensive glimpses, they seem like sudden reve- 
lations ! 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 295 

In the very words of the characters we read the 
manners of the times. Shakespeare minces noth- 
ing. He uses not the chosen and dainty words of 
the cloistered poet, who would write but what 
would not offend the good taste of his literary 
lady friends ; but he employs the very words, ap- 
pellations and oaths that such characters actually 
uttered in life. 

Among all artists Shakespeare was the most 
thoroughly realistic. He idealized only ideal 
characters. Where can be found a more inno- 
cently loving girl, chaste as ice and pure as snow, 
than Ophelia? Where else the very acme of na- 
tive feminine innocence and poetic romance, so 
perfectly revealed, as in Miranda; or where else 
can be found the mingling of common sense and 
hoydenish gaiety, the worth of true womanliness 
touched with the sprightliness of girlish coquetry, 
more exquisitely than in the matchless Portia? 

From the lips of such characters we would ex- 
pect to flow only the stream of purest thought and 
noblest emotion. And never do they betray or 
disappoint our anticipations. Their words are 
always becoming and in perfect keeping with the 
characters they reveal. But on the contrary when 



296 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Caliban, Trinculo or Fallstaff speak they utter 
scurvy and offensive language, such as cannot be 
repeated in good company. But without such lan- 
guage such characters would be imperfectly por- 
trayed. So true is this great master to his art 
that he absolutely loses his own personality. 

It might be justly questioned whether Shakes- 
peare really ever knew his own character or per- 
sonality. He was so inwoven and absorbed in 
the particular character he may be portraying 
that his forms of expression, his emotions and 
passions, his mental moods and physical manner- 
isms become so perfectly those of the character, he 
must needs have somewhat assumed them in his 
own experiences. One who can become so com- 
pletely abstracted in the creations of his art, and 
whose art is so prolific and limitless as was that 
of Shakespeare, must necessarily be but little 
with his actual self whatever that may be. His 
genius is so universal, his individual consciousness 
becomes continuously metamorphosed. It is in- 
deed this impersonal quality in Shakespeare, that 
made him plastic and susceptible to all moods and 
impressions, and made possible the creation of 
such numerous characters through his inexhaust- 
ible genius. 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 297 

He seems to have been a universal ocean into 
which flowed all the streams of human life and 
the inspiration of divine conceptions. On the 
mirroring surface of the vast ocean of thought 
which the genius of Shakespeare created, all hu- 
manity finds its perfect reflection. No thought 
has ever been uttered which he has not forestalled ; 
no emotion experienced that he has not felt and 
vividly expressed. All history, all life, all human 
action, all philosophy, science and poetry flow to 
him intuitively and as freely as a cataract rushing 
down a mountain steep. Whosoever reads Shakes- 
peare attentively, and with sympatheic inspira- 
tion, will ever feel that natural desire for greater 
knowledge which his immortal contemporary, 
Chrisopher Marlowe, describes in these musical 
words : 

" Nature that formed us of four elements, 
Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds ; 
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
The wondrous architecture of the world, 
And measure every wondering planet's course, 
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
And always moving as the restless spheres, 



298 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest, 
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all." 

Tamburlaine; Part I, Act II. 

Thus whoever allows himself to become one 
with Shakespeare in spirit and contemplation 
must needs grow in knowledge, experience and the 
ripe fruitage of inward wisdom. So gently does 
he lead us into every field of study and investiga- 
tion that by listening only to his graceful lyre 
are we taught unwittingly and without sensible or 
annoying labor. As he himself writes of Henry 
V., we may justly quote of him in reference to his 
vast learning : — 

" Hear him but reason in divinity, 
And, all-admiring, with an inward wish 
You would desire that the king were made a pre- 
late; 
Hear him debate of commonwealth affairs, 
You would say — it hath been all-in-all his study; 
Let him discourse of war, and you shall hear 
A fearful battle render'd you in music; 
Turn him to any cause of policy, 
The Gordion knot of it he will unloose, 
Familiar as his garter; that, when he speaks, 
The air, a charter'd libertine, is still, 
And the mute wonder lurketh in men's ears, 
To steal his sweet and honey'd sentences." 



THE STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE 299 

I do not say that Shakespeare is all in all the 
only author that the cultured man should read, 
ponder and digest; but I do say that whoso lives 
with him in thought, and drinks his "honeyed 
sentences" with his daily meat, imbibes at the very 
fountain head of inspiration, and hears the voic- 
ings of a deathless god. 



A STRING OF PEARLS SELECTED FROM 
HAMLET 

WITH ORIGINAL HEADINGS AND 
ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED 



A STRING OF PEARLS FROM HAMLET 

Ambition 

My fate cries out, 
And makes each petty artery in this body, 
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. 

Appreciation of Friendship 

Those friends thou hast and their adoption 

tried, 
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. 

Authority of Reason 

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and godlike reason 
To fust in us unus'd. 

Bestial Man 

What is man, 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. 

The Bestial Rich 

Let a beast be lord to beasts, and his crib 
shall stand at the king's mess. 
The Bliss of Sleep 

By a sleep to say we end 
The heart ache and the thousand natural shocks 
That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation 
Devoutly to be wish'd. 
303 



304 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Brevity of Life 

A man's life is no more than to say " One." 

The Calumny of Virtue 

Virtue itself escapes not caluminous strokes; 
The canker galls the infants of the spring, 
Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd. 

Caution and Valor 
Beware 
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in, 
Bear't that the oppos'd may beware of thee. 

Character and Attire 

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 

But not express'd in fancy; rich not gaudy; 

For the apparel oft proclaims the man. 

Condolence of Friendship 

You do, surely, bar the door upon your 
own liberty if you deny your griefs to your 
friend. 

Conventionality 

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, 
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, 
That to the use of action fair and good 
He likewise gives a frock or livery, 
That aptly is put on. 

Correct Method of Speaking 

Let your discretion be your tutor; suit the 
action to the word, the word to the action; with 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 305 

this special observance, that you o'er step not 
the modesty of nature. 

The Coward 

I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall to make 
oppression bitter. 

The Cowardice of Conventional Conscience 
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, 
And thus the native hue of resolution 
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, 
And enterprises of great pith and moment 
With this regard their currents turn awry, 
And lose the name of action. 

Credit and Industry 

Neither a borrower nor a lender be; 

For loan oft loses both itself and friend, 

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. 

Crimes' Sure Exposure 
Foul deeds will rise, 
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's 

eyes. 

Cunning of the Insane 

How pregnant his replies! A happiness 
that often madness hits on, which reason and 
sanity could not so prosperously be deliver'd of. 



306 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

The Decoy of Falsehood 

And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, 
With windlasses and with assays of bias, 
By indirections find directions out. 

Democracy of Death 

Your worm is your only emperor for diet; 
we fat all creatures else to fat us; and we fat 
ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your 
lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, 
but one table; that's the end. 

Destiny 

There's a special providence in the fall of 
a sparrow. If it be not now 'tis not to come; 
if it be not to come it will be now; if it be not 
now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. 

Divine Right of Kings 

There is such divinity doth hedge a king, 
That treason can but peep to what it would, 
Acts little of his will. 

Dramas 

These are the abstract and brief chronicles 
of the time. 

Dread of After-Life 

Who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life, 
But that the dread of something after death, 
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 307 

No traveller returns, puzzles the will, 
And makes us rather bear the ills we have 
Then fly to others that we known not of. 

Enormity of Crime 

Such an act 
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty, 
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose 
From the fair forehead of an innocent love, 
And sets a blister there. 

Evolution op the Soul 

Nature crescent does not grow alone 
In thews and bulk, but, as this temple waxes, 
The inward service of the mind and soul 
Grows wide withal. 

Extremes op Youth and Age 

By heaven, it is as proper to our age 
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinion, 
As it is common for the younger sort 
To lack discretion. 

False Grief 

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears 
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes. 

Familiarity and Contempt 

Be thou familiar, by no means vulgar. 

Fatality of a Single Weakness 

So, oft it chances in particular men, 



308 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

That for some vicious mole of nature in them, 
Their virtues else, be they as pure as grace, 
Shall in the general censure take corruption 
From that particular fault. 

The Fear of Death 

In that sleep of death what dreams may 
come, 
When we have shuffl'd off this mortal coil, 
Must give us pause: there's the respect 
That makes calamity of so long life. 

The Fear of Guilt 

Let the galled jade wince; our withers are 
un wrung. 

Fearlessness of Truth 

I set you up a glass 
Where you may see the inmost part of you. 

Flattery 

Why should the poor be flattered? 
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, 
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, 
Where thrift may follow fawning. 

Force of Habit 

The use almost can change the stamp of nature, 
And either master the devil, or throw him out 
With wondrous potency. 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 309 

Fortitude 

Blest are those 
Whose blood and judgment are so well com- 

mingl'd, 
That they are not a pipe for fortune's finger. 
To sound what stop she please. 
Ghoulish Parsimony 

The funeral bak'd meats 

Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. 
The Gloom of Melancholy 

This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me 
a sterile promontory; this most excellent can- 
opy, the air, this brave o'erhanging firmament, 
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, — 
why, it appears to me no other thing than a 
foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 
The Gossip's Art 

Breathe his faults so quaintly 
That they may seem the taints of liberty, 

The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind: — 
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth. 

The Gossip's Fang 

Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, 
thou shalt not escape culumny. 
Guilt its own Detective 

Murther, though it have no tongue, will 
speak with most miraculous organ. 



310 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Guilt's Self-Accusation 

So full of artless jealousy is guilt, 
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. 

Heroic Treatment 

Diseases desperate grown 
By desperate appliance are relieved. 

Human Progress 

The age is grown so pick'd that the toe 
of the peasant comes so near the heel of the 
courtier, he galls his kibe. 

Humiliation of Death 

That skull had a tongue in it and could 
sing once; how the knave jowls it to the 
ground, as if 't were Cain's jaw bone, that did 
the first murther; — and now my Lady Worm's 
chapless, and knock'd about the mazzard with 
a sexton's spade. 

The Hypocrite 

We are oft to blame in this 
— 'Tis too much proved — that with devotion's 

visage 
And pious action, we do sugar o'er 
The devil himself. 

Indecision 

Like a man to double business bound, 
I stand in pause where I shall first begin, 
And both neglect. 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 311 

The Index of the Face 

There is a kind of confession in your looks 
which your modesties have not craft enough 
to color. 

Indolence 

The fat weed 
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf. 

Inoperative Laws 

It is a custom 
More honor 'd in the breach than in the obser- 
vance. 

Insanity 

Noble and most sovereign reason, 
Like sweet bells jangled out of tune, and harsh. 

Justice and Forgiveness 

Since I am still possess'd 
Of those effects for which I did the murther, 
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen, 
May one be pardon'd and retain the offence ? 

The Lash of Conscience 

The harlot's cheek, beautified with plastering 

art, 
Is not more guilty to the thing that helps it, 
Than is my deed to my most painted word. 

Life's Problem 

To be or not to be; that is the question. 



312 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, 
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles, 
And by opposing end them? 

Lip-Service 

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below ; 
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. 

Love and Lust 

Keep you in the rear of your affection 
Out of shot and danger of desire. 

Majesty of Man 

What a piece of work is man! how noble 
in reason ! how infinite in faculty ; in form and 
moving how express and admirable! in action 
how like an angel! in apprehension how like a 
god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of 
animals ! 

The Mania of Dizzying Heights 

The very place puts toys of desperation, 
Without more motive, into every brain 
That looks so many fathoms to the sea, 
And hears it roar beneath. 

Memory 

Thy commandment all alone shall live 
Within the book and volume of my brain. 

Mercy 

Whereto serves mercy 
But to confront the visage of offence? 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 313 

The Mind's Illusionment 

Sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'd, 
But it reserv'd some quantity of choice. 

Miscalculation 

My arrows 
Too lightly timber'd for so loud a wind, 
Have reverted to my bow again 
And not where I had aim'd them. 

Money and Corruption 

In the corrupted currents of this world 
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, 
And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself 
Buys out the law. 

Moodiness 

And thus awhile the fit will work on him; 
Anon, as patient as the female dove, 
When that her golden couplets are disclos'd, 
His silence will sit drooping. 

Mystery of Providence 

There's a divinity that shapes our ends 
Rough hew them how we will. 

Night the Friend of Crime 

'Tis now the very witching time of night, 
When church yards yawn, and hell itself 

breathes out 
Contagion to this world. 



314 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Nursing an Evil Spirit 

Now could I drink hot blood, 

And do such bitter business as the day 

Would quake to look on. 

On Sincerity in Mourning 

Seems, madam ; nay it is ; I know not seems. 
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, 
Nor customary suits of solemn black, 
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath, 
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, 
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage, 
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief, 
That can denote me truly; these indeed seem, 
For they are actions that a man might play: 
But I have that within that passeth show; 
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. 

The Paragon of a Man 

Give me that man 
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear 
him 
In my heart's core, aye, in my heart of hearts. 
Passion's Self-Consumption 

There lives within the very flame of love 
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it. 
The Perfect Character 

The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
The glass of fashion and the mould of form, 
The observ'd of all observers. 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 315 



Periodicity of Fatalities 

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, 
But in battalions. 

Perseverance: In Search for the Truth 
If circumstances lead me, I will find 
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed 
Within the centre. 

Power of Forgetfulness 

From the table of my memory 
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, 
That youth and observation copied there. 

Power of Thought 

There is nothing either good or bad, but 
thinking makes it so. 

Preaching and Practice 

Do not as some ungracious pastors do, 
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, 
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, 
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads. 

Precepts for Correct Conduct 

Give thy thoughts no tongue, 

Nor any unproportion'd thought his act. 

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; 

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judg- 
ment. 

This above all, to thine own self be true, 



316 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

And it must follow as the night the day, 
Thou can'st not then be false to any man. 

The Public Leader 

The single and peculiar life is bound 
With all the strength and armor of the mind 
To keep itself from noyance ; but much more 
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests 
The lives of many. 

Purgatory 

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, 
And for the day confined to fast in fires, 
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature 
Are burnt and purg'd away. 

The Quality of Favors 

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. 

Rarity of Honesty 

To be honest as this world goes, is to be 
one picked out of ten thousand. 

Relief in Suicide 

Who would bear the whips and scorn of time, 
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's con- 
tumely, 
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay, 
The insolence of office, and the spurns 
That patient merit of the unworthy takes, 
When he himself might his quietus make 
With a bare bodkin. 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 317 



Resignation 

For thou hast been 
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing, 
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards 
Has ta'en with equal thanks. 

Rights of Authority 

Both your majesties 
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us, 
Put your dread pleasures more into command 
Than to entreaty. 

The Scandal-Monger 

Slander — 
Whose whisper o'er the world's diameter, 
As level as the cannon to his blank, 
Transports his poison'd shot. 

Self-Satisfaction 

I could be bound in a nut-shell, and count 
myself a king of infinite space. 

Sensationalism 

There was for awhile no money bid for ar- 
gument, unless the poet and the player went 
to cuffs in the question. 

Servility to the Rich 

In the fatness of these pursy times, 
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg. 

Susceptibility 

A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear. 



318 THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET 

Sweetness of Vengeance 

'Tis the sport to have the engineer 
Hoist with his own petar. 

Sword and Pen 

Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose- 
quills. 

Unity of Life 

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat 
of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of 
that worm. 

The Unity of Spirit 

Never alone 
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan. 

Uses of the Stage 

The purpose of the playing from the first 
and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere, the 
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own 
feature, scorn her own image, and the very 
age and body of the time his form and pres- 
sure. 

Vanity of Ambition 

The very substance of the ambitious is 
merely the shadow of a dream. 

Vanity of Life 

Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away; 
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, 
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw. 



PEARLS FROM HAMLET 319 

Veneer of Culture 

Thus has he, and many more of the same 
bevy the drossy age dotes on, only got the tune 
of the time and outward habit of encounter. 

Virtue and Vice Contrasted 

By virtue, as it never will be mov'd 
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, 
So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, 
Will waste itself in a celestial bed, 
And prey on garbage. 

Virtue of Prayer 

And what's in prayer but this two fold force, — 
To be forestall'd ere we come to fall, 
Or pardon'd being down? 

Vulgarism of Popularity 

Do not dull thy palm with entertainment 
Of each new hatch't, unfledg'd comrade. 

Weariness of Life 

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this world ! 
Fie o'nt, O Fie ! 'Tis an unweeded garden, 
That grows to seed, things rank and gross in 

nature 
Possess it merely. 

Worth of Appearance 

Assume a virtue if you have it not. 



MODERN LIGHT 

ON IMMORTALITY 

BEING AN ORIGINAL EXCURSION INTO HISTORICAL 

RESEARCH AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY POINTING 

TO A NEW SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM 

BY 
HENRY FRANK 

This volume is one of the author's most import- 
ant contributions to the literature of the science 
of life, and carries the reader through the whole 
range of Nature and human experience, through 
philosophy and the natural sciences, through 
religious and ethical doctrines and beliefs ancient 
and modern. Freed from all traditional predilec- 
tions and unimpeded by preconceived notions, he 
has traversed with a truly scientific spirit and in 
logical sequence the historical and philosophical 
ground of the doctrine ; yet the scope of the 
author's survey is such as to make this retrospect 
only preliminary to the main theme. 

For with this historical data as an introduction 
or background for the modern scientific aspect of 
the problem, Mr. Frank ventures, in the light of 
the latest facts and observations of experimental 
science, upon a heretofore untrodden way. The 
author's unanticipated conclusions, although un- 
usual, are thus established upon carefully and 
properly sifted scientific data. Mr. Frank has 
realized that his conclusions must be derived from 
sources wholly divorced from any metaphysics or 
philosophy that was tinged with religious pre- 
judice. So he has drawn freely upon such authori- 
ties as the great German biologists, histologists 
and chemists, and upon a score of recent scientific 
explorers such as Huxley, Darwin, Crookes, Lord 
Kelvin, and others. But the method of approach 
and the conclusions reached are wholly original, 
the volume thus becoming the expression of the 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

latest and most authoritative message on its 
tremendous subject. It is a book to compel 
attention and profound consideration and it has 
awakened wide discussion, as is shown by the 
following 

EXCERPTS SELECTED FROM OVER 
100 PRESS REVIEWS 

San Francisco Chronicle : 

"Extraordinary in the nature of its argument for 
immortality, a surprise to the author, who has frankly 
presented the result of his own individual researches, 
'Modern Light on Immortality' is a record of the 
writer's explorations in search of a rational basis for 
a belief in a future life for man, during whose course 
he has ransacked the very Cosmos for evidence, and 
found it where he least expected it. Mr. Frank is 
a philosophical and psychological writer of some 
note, a member of the American Institute for Scientific 
Research, and founder and for over ten years speaker 
for the Metropolitan Independent Church, of New 
York City. Above all, he is a seeker after truth. . . 
Unwittingly and without design the author maintains 
that science has furnished the thinking world with 
certain data, which, while doing no violence to logic, 
may be utilized in forming a rational and more intel- 
ligent conception concerning the possibilities of the 
after life than man has ever been permitted to enter- 
tain in all the past." 

Springfield Republican'. 

"The age long quest for assurance concerning an 
after life finds another explorer in the person of Henry 
Frank, whose voice and pen have made him familiar 
to a wide circle of readers and thinkers, especially 
among the liberal school. His explorations are pre- 
sented in a volume entitled 'Modern Light on Immor- 
tality.' He calls it an original excursion into histori- 
cal research and scientific discovery, pointing to a new 
solution of the problem. His method seems to be what 
he claims — original ; we do not recall another approach 
to the subject along just these lines. Briefly stated, 
he discards all theories propounded by philosophy and 
religion, and through the new psychology argues his 
way to a belief that the human soul has the power of 
indefinite survival. His argument is in two parts. 
Historically he reviews all that is available of human 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

thought concerning immortality, the primitive sources 
of belief in the after life, the Druidic, Egyptian, Assy- 
rian, Chaldaean, Greek, Hebrew, Christian, concep- 
tions, giving to the latter about one-third of the space 
alloted to this part of his research. Holding to a late 
date for the composition of the gospels, and that the 
Christian revelation or speculation, the best of all, 
is unauthoritative, the author closes the first part of the 
search for truth with the negative argument prepon- 
derant; the old arguments to him seem puerile, weak 
and ineffective, and he acknowledges that thus far 
the quest has been disappointing; and the author is 
left in the position of the Knights of the Round Table 
in their search for the Holy Grail — following wander- 
ing fires. In the second part the author starts on a 
new trail. . . Dr. Frank believes he has found the 
right path of the ultimate goal." 

The Review of Reviews: 

"Mr. Henry Frank, the minister of an independent 
religious congregation in New York City searching 
for 'Modern Light on Immortality' finds it in the re- 
searches of biology and physics. This is the instruc- 
tive part of the volume ; its first half finds only dark- 
ness on the subject elsewhere, even in the teaching of 
Jesus. 'Bioplasmic substance' constitutes a spiritual 
body within the mortal body, and this is immortal, 
the permanent abode and organ of conscious person- 
ality. To this, as confirmatory of the Gospels, no 
Christian need object." 

The Lutheran Observer: 

"A book with a bias, and a bias far away from 
orthodox Christianity. It is divided into two parts. . 
both discussions are interesting. . . The final con- 
clusion is remarkable in that the author's maze of 
materialistic reasoning brings him in the end to what 
amounts to a doctrine of a spiritual body and a 
psychic personality surviving the process of death, for 
certain human beings who have attained a unitary 
self-consciousness resulting from the refinement of 
psychic 'cells' " 

The Homiletic Review. 

"The point of interest in this book is the original 
conclusion to which the author arrives. The cell 
structure of the refined physical body may persist 
after the coarser structure dissolves, being supported 
by nutriment correspondingly refined. Along with the 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

concensus of the psychic 'cells' having developed an 
organic self-consciousness by which they are in turn 
co-ordinated into a unitary working possibility, may 
correspondingly be supported by appropriate environ- 
ment. This amounts to a doctrine of a spiritual body, 
and a psychic personality, surviving the process of 
death. This, however, happens only with those human 
beings who have attained to this unitary self-con- 
sciousness resulting from. the refinement of the cells. 
This speculation is very interesting." 

The Western Christian Advocate: 

"The question of immortality does not lose its inter- 
est. The volume under review is an attempt at a 
most comprehensive study of the question. The author 
seeks to enter all realms of knowledge, and experi- 
ence where light may be gained, and says that he 
shrinks not from the truths discovered. In a spirit 
of scientific enquiry he knocks at the door of nature, 
human experience, philosophy, science, history, and 
religion, and is satisfied only with an entrance and 
a careful examination of all these realms. Beginning 
with the antiquity of man's faith, he follows the evo- 
lution of this faith in immortality through the cen- 
turies down to the time of Christ. Shifting then from 
the historical and experimental phrase of the subject, 
he enters the philosophical and the scientific realm and 
seeks to bring their message to bear upon the prob- 
lem. . . We do not hesitate to say that to the Chris- 
tian student who seeks light from whatever source 
on the problem of immortality, the book will prove 
of value because it presents much that is truly original, 
thought-stimulating and pertinent to the problem. It 
probably brings together more material shedding light 
on the problem than any similar work." 

Zion's Herald: 

"The author of this book does not profess to have 
advanced an argument which finally proves the im- 
mortality of the human soul ; but he has made a strong 
approach towards it. He started from a basis of much 
skepticism, not to give it a harsher name, with a 
sincere desire for the truth. He comes out with a 
very assured faith, much surprised at the result. He 
feels and has a right to feel, that 'his deductions are 
strictly logical and grounded on accurate and indis- 
putable scientific data. It is a long process. . . . 
The author discusses the nature of matter, the gen- 
ration of instinct, psychogeny or soul generation, the 
origin of organic life, physical origin of self-con- 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

sciousness, identity of substance, energy and spirit, 
physical and psychical immortality, and similar difficult 
questions. And. . there is another extensive treatise 
to follow, which will traverse the discoveries of 
modern research pertaining to the existence and 
powers of the 'Psychic Basis of the Soul' or the 'Un- 
conscious Self.' We shall look for it with interest." 

Times Saturday Review of Books: 

"A 'Modern Light on Immortality.' The problem 
of the Future State on Evidence Derived from All 
Sources, discussed by Mr. Frank (here follows a 
column and a half review closing with:) There is 
much in this volume which will stimulate rational 
thought and enquiry even if it falls short of offering 
anything positive. The author is to be commended 
for industry, impartiality and the generally successful 
way in which he handles his facts." 

Editorial from another edition of the Times Saturday 
Review ; 

ROBERT ELSMERE ANTICIPATED 
"The story of the minister driven to doubt by 
scientific study was commonplace in the United 
States long before the day of 'Robert Elsmere," 
and Henry Frank, the author of 'Modern Light 
on Immortality,' lived it while he was yet one 
of the youngest members of the Minnesota Confer- 
ence of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was 
publicly informed by his Bishop that he could not 
be allowed to deliver himself of such ideas as he had 
come to entertain. He left the Methodist Episcopal 
Church and vainly tried to remain content with the 
creed of another. Before abandoning the effort he 
came to New York, founded a congregation of the 
most liberal nature, and served it for ten years. He 
found, however, that his people, being under no especial 
obligation to believe anything, were desirous of being 
assured on new grounds of the immortality of the 
soul, and set himself to look for them, not expecting 
to find any. History, exhaustively examined, left 
both him and his congregation where it found them ; 
science compelled him to accept the disputed doc- 
trine, and his book tells the story of his quest." 

Providence Journal; 

"Mr. Frank approaches the theory of immortality 
in a markedly original way. He attempts to ignore 
altogether tradition and to look at history and philo- 
sophy with unprejudiced eyes. Some of his conclu- 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

sions are rather startling. . . In his survey of im- 
mortality and modern science, ' Mr. Frank gives us 
some interesting conclusions. His knowledge is con- 
siderable and his ingenuity is even greater. . . But 
to give unqualified approval to all his deductions 
would be impossible. Nevertheless, the book is in 
many ways a notable contribution to original study 
of the problem of immortality; it is at all events 
worth reading. . ." 

From Edwin Markham's review in the New York 
American and the San Francisco Examiner: 
"'Modern Light on Immortality,' by Henry Frank, 
is a book that will be a consolation and a stay to 
thousands. It is based on the affirmation that science 
supports the fact of immortality of the human soul. 
Mr. Frank, putting out of his mind all the assertions 
of the ancient scriptures of all nations, searches 
through nature and human experience for some under- 
lying principle that will throw light on the problem. 
He probes all religions, all philosophies, seeking for 
the grounds and evidences of immortality, and then 
examines them under the sharp light of modern ex- 
perimental science. . . His scholarly, thoughtful 
argument is well worth study, and will aid many 
restless seekers after truth to find the peace that 
they cannot find in the old, simple act of faith. . . 
His conclusions will be found highly suggestive to 
all thinking minds, and highly consoling to all who 
cling to the nobler hopes of religion. I wish the book 
a million readers." 

Universalist Leader : 

"This is the book of one who has arrived at doubt 
concerning the entire Gospel story of the resurrec- 
tion, and is searching for some other basis for faith 
in immortality. Henry Frank is a seeker. He joined 
long ago those who never pitch their tent permanently. 
They have taken to the open road. Whatever Mr. 
Frank says or writes is vital and stimulating. . . 
After elaborately uncovering what he believes to be 
the weak spots in the Biblical proof of immortality, 
the author proceeds just as elaborately to unfold what 
he believes to be the scientific proof of immortality. 
Whether he succeeds in making this change of base 
must be left to the readers of his book. . . Cer- 
tainly, if one is looking for an earnest, scholarly 
discussion of the subject from one who has the mind 
of the critic and the instinct of worship, he could 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

go much farther and fare much worse then follow 
Henry Frank in his search for the clue to immortality." 

Reformed Church Messenger: 

"This book is undoubtedly an able one. It is ad- 
mittedly incomplete, and, extended as this volume is, 
it is to be supplemented by 'another volume which 
shall traverse the discoveries of modern research per- 
taining to the existence of the Soul or the Uncon- 
scious Self.' A monist is the writer, a warm disciple 
of Haeckel, accepting most of his positions, but he 
rejects the latter's materialism, and throughout is not 
only profoundly earnest but is equally reverent. . . 
Altogether, it is a notable book and one which those 
who prefer to face as best they can and not to shun 
t the problems of existence, will, in spite of a few 
relapses and imperfections, very heartily delight in." 

Light, {London, Eng.) : 

"We must do Mr. Frank the justice to say that his 
'Excursion into historical research and scientific dis- 
covery,' is devised on a scale and carried out with a 
thoroughness that must command attention and re- 
spect. His book is valuable in many ways, but is 
especially so as a fine exposition of 'Monism' on a 
loftier and larger stage than Haeckel's, and his 
special merit is that he does not so much oppose and 
reply to Haeckel as expound him and give him a hand 
up. He fully recognises that it is a real universe, that 
Nature is altogether a unity, and that what we call 
the soul is the 'organized expression, through certain 
highly developed physiological avenues, of that uni- 
versal energy which everywhere exists as impersonal 
and semi-intelligent,' and which in man becomes self- 
conscious and supremely intelligent. . . It is well 
and modernly put, and it is valuable." 

Chicago Post: 

"It is a relief to turn to the scholarly work of Mr. 
Henry Frank, who goes to science for illumination 
on personal immortality. . . The book may be read 
with profit and enjoyment on account of the stimulat- 
ing quality of such an attempt. Mr. Frank shows 
wide reading and scientific sympathy, colored by re- 
spect to the religious consciousness. . . He promises 
another book shortly which will elucidate his theory 
in regard to a subliminal self and its immortality. 
Many, however, will remain perfectly satisfied with the 
present volume for it undoubtedly points the way to 
that impersonal immortality which is satisfying to 
many noble minds." 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

The Interior'. 

"This work professes to be a thorough going rein- 
vestigation of the problem of a future life without 
any bias or prejudgment whatever. Traditional teach- 
ings on the subject are set aside by the author as 
untenable in the light of modern science. Similarly, 
deductions of the doctrine of immortality from the 
Bible are left behind as of little value, since the author 
has ceased to believe in the reality of divine revela- 
lation. Accordingly, the only source of approach to 
the truth left is that pursued by the scientists. An 
investigation of this sort has both a negative and a 
positive side, and the author gives both of these. The 
author seems to adopt Haeckel's monism, Darwin's 
theory of natural selection, Lord Kelvin's views as 
to the ultimate nature of matter, and in fact, almost 
every recent formulation regarding life, force and 
personality, combining all these into the theory of 
the soul and asserting upon the basis of this synthesis 
human immortality. It will be unnecessary to pass 
judgment regarding the validity of the synthesis. 
Stranger things have sometimes ultimately resulted in 
a successful, harmonious, philosophical system." 

Twentieth Century Magazine: 

"This volume is thoroughly rationalistic. The 
author views the whole subject through the glasses of 
the modern materialistic physical scientist, and for 
this reason his final conclusions are as interesting as 
they are surprising. In reading the work one cannot 
fail to be impressed with the fact that Mr. Frank is 
above all else a truth-seeker. He is thoroughly sincere 
and absolutely fearless. His writings display the 
splendid enthusiasm and tireless industry of the mod- 
ern scientific scholar in studying the history of the 
past, the philosophical concepts of the ages and the 
deductions and generalizations of the master physical 
scientists of our day; and if we find it impossible at 
times to agree with his conclusions it is because in 
the study of the mighty problems of man, the uni- 
verse and the potential immortality of the soul, we 
reason from different premises. . . It is a great 
book and one that is bound to challenge the thoughtful 
attention of thousands of persons who have been 
dazzled and won over by the modern physical scient- 
ists who have so wonderfully enriched the thought 
of the world." 

The Open Court: 
"In this carefully prepared volume Mr. Frank. . . 



MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

presents a thorough study of the immortality prob- 
lem which he has finally succeeded in solving to his 
own satisfaction. Led by the insistence of his con- 
gregation not to neglect the subject, but to deal with 
it as he has with other themes from a scientific and 
rational point of view, Mr. Frank consented to take 
them with him along the path of inquiry. . . Be- 
ginning almost with the inauguration of human 
thought at the dawn of civilization he attempts to set 
forth the actual state of the human mind with refer- 
ence to its oft illusive dream." 

The Living Church: 

"The author of this remarkable book, having, as 
he claims, divested himself of every religious belief 
and theological restriction, undertakes the stupendous 
task of weighing all evidence bearing upon the popular 
belief in human immortality with a view of arriving 
at an independent and unprejudiced conclusion for 
himself. He traverses the whole range of nature and 
human experience, he considers and analyzes all re- 
ligious and philosophical beliefs, ancient and modern. 
Finally, he studies the problem in the light of the most 
recent experimental science and so he arrives at his 
conclusion." 

The United Presbyterian: 

"Of the author's ability, industry and sincerity, there 
can be no doubt. His book is a serious and sincere at- 
tempt at a modern solution of the ancient prob- 
lem. . . While admiring the candor which charac- 
terizes the discussion, we dissent most emphatically 
from the author's positions set forth in chapters ten 
and sixteen, inclusive, Part I, in which he undertakes 
to account for the Jewish and Christian conceptions 
of an afterlife. In this part he seems to discard di- 
vine revelation entirely and explains the doctrine of 
immortality in terms of an enthusiastic Jewish chiliasm 
or of pagan naturalism. . . Paul's doctrine of the 
resurrection was based on the Eleusinian and Dyoni- 
sian mysteries. Elsewhere, by a stroke of genius he 
solves a riddle that has perplexed all commentators 
and exegetes, ancient and modern, by affirming that 
Peter was Paul's 'thorn in the flesh.' He also seeks 
to prove that Peter regarded Paul as 'Simon Magus.' " 

Brooklyn Times : 

"This book is especially timely and will be read with 
pleasure. . . It is a remarkable work in temper, 
disposition, in a certain clarity of idea, and in manner 







MODERN LIGHT ON IMMORTALITY 

of presentation. It is rare to see a man of ecclesiastic 
training pursuing a subject with so admirable a 
scientific disposition and temper and in so unbiased 
a fashion as does Dr. Frank in the present volume. . . 
The book is optimistic. It is the investigation into 
science that is surprising. It would be too bad to tell 
what the author finds ; suffice it to say what he finds is 
astonishing. . . His only wish is to seek and to find 
the truth. Has he? We leave it to the reader. Our 
advice is that you read the book. You will find it 
worth while." 

Utica Press: 

"That the soul is to be rewarded with immortality 
is convincing to the author of this latest work on the 
subject. He is modest enough to feel uncertain re- 
garding his influence on other thinkers. Beyond the 
argument for the indestructibility of the soul he does 
not venture, for these essays are based on the dis- 
coveries of science alone and she has dared conjec- 
ture nothing concerning the future life of man. . . 
Mr. Frank's original conclusions are worthy of a care- 
ful study and the results of further research, which 
he promises in a future volume, are eagerly antici- 
pated." 

Glasgow Herald, (Scotland) : 

"The work, 'Modern Light on Immortality,' must 
have involved an immense amount of research, both 
historical and scientific, and though the author's claim 
to be the only writer who has 'traversed the entire 
region' may perhaps be questioned, it must be admitted 
that in tracing the belief in immortality from primeval 
times downward, he has brought within the compass 
of a volume of moderate size a mass of information 
which is likely to prove of great value to those who 
come after him. But it is not on his historical studies 
but on his scientific investigations that the author 
bases his conclusions. . . These views are interest- 
ing as the result of lengthened and painstaking inquiry 
and as the final judgment of a man who set forth 
from a definitely skeptical standpoint. Whether or not 
they are accepted by Mr. Frank's congregation, they 
will not improbably meet with keen criticism alike 
from the orthodox and the scientific standpoint." 

Large 8 vo. ; 467 pp.; $1.85 net; $2.00 by mail. 
SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 
SIX BEACON STREET. BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 



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